The recently widowed Tom (Adam Scott) and his son Jake (Acston Luca Porto) move to Garretton, the hometown of the wife and mother they have lost. But Garretton is also famous for the child serial killer known as The Whisper Man, who terrorised the town fifteen years ago, and it is not long before Jake goes missing.
The Whisper Man is a really solid throwback to the sort of serial killer thriller procedural that was popular in the 1990s, with a cast that makes it eminently watchable. And yet, it is also nothing that you will not have seen before, or that is likely to topple the best in the genre from their perches. It is the epitome of a good watch that you might have forgotten all about a few years from now.
The storyline and characters are all familiar genre tropes, but the cast make them better than they have any right to be.
Tom is a grieving husband who has turned to the bottle and is struggling to make time for his son’s overactive imagination. Adam Scott gives him just the right amount of desperation to allow us all to maintain our sympathies for his ordeal.
Jake is the sort of precocious child who has an imaginary friend and spouts vague sentences that you know will have a clever meaning later on in proceedings. Young Alston Luca Porto keeps him from being annoying.
Robert De Niro then appears as Tom’s estranged father Peter, who just so happened to be the detective who caught The Whisper Man all those years ago. A task so onerous that it led to him turning to the bottle and obliterating his relationship with his family. De Niro delivers a solid turn as the implacable and grizzled detective.
Michelle Monaghan plays the current detective charged with finding this new serial killer, in a role that is a pretty thankless task for someone of her talents.
But it is the prime suspects who get the best roles. Hamish Linklater plays a creepy individual who collects murder memorabilia, whilst Michael Keaton plays the original Whisper Man, who has been behind bars for so many years. And it is Keaton who absolutely steals the film each time he appears, with his sparring scenes with De Niro being the most fun.
As the plot slowly unfolds, the very clear allusions to the “sins of the father” storyline become apparent and add a little weight to proceedings. Alongside the good performances from the cast, they are enough to make The Whisper Man a perfectly enjoyable thriller. It just isn’t one that is likely to linger in the memory for very long.
