Robert De Niro Hunts the Same Killer Twice in the Netflix Crime Thriller The Whisper Man
“Daddy issues” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
It’s been a big year for Adam Scott playing hard-drinking novelists. First came Hokum, in which the Parks and Recreation star played against type as an alcoholic writer who gets caught up in some spooky happenings at a haunted hotel. In The Whisper Man, his problems are more down to earth: Rather than ghosts and witches, his character — also a writer, and also a drinker — is faced with the very real horror of finding his son after the boy is kidnapped by a serial killer.
For Tom (Scott), this is part of a nightmarish cycle. When he was a boy, his father — an emotionally distant police detective played by Robert De Niro — caught a notorious murderer who went by the name “The Whisper Man.” If that sounds like a child’s imaginary friend, you’re partially right: This killer specifically targeted sensitive kids, abducting them and forcing them to create crayon drawings of their ordeal before sending them “under the floor,” as Tom’s son Jake (Acston Luca Porto) puts it. He even had his own folk rhyme: “If you’re lonely, sad or blue, the Whisper Man will come for you.”
But the Whisper Man, whose real name turned out to be Frank Carter (Michael Keaton), has been in prison for decades. So why is it happening again? That’s what Detective Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan) wants to know. Once Detective Beck sees the connection between the case of a murdered boy and the “Whisper Man” killings of her childhood, she calls on Pete (De Niro), now retired and estranged from his son and grandson, for help. But then Jake goes missing, and a desperate Tom decides to swallow his resentment and ask Pete for help as well.
There’s a lot going on here with fathers and sons and what they pass down to each other, some of it quite dark. But while The Whisper Man runs on daddy issues, it also appeals to true-crime fans with a subplot about an arrogant “murderabilia” collector played by Hamish Linklater. And then there’s Frank Carter himself, who eventually joins the investigation in a Hannibal Lector-type advisory role. We’ve seen it before, but still — who better than a killer to catch a killer, especially one with the exact same M.O.?
Adam Driver plays yet another troubled crime novelist.
The Whisper Man is based on a novel, and some of the details — Tom’s career as a crime novelist, for example, or the killer’s creepy obsession with cassette tapes — have been sanded down in the transition from page to screen. That’s the kind of stuff that can only be fully explored in a TV series, to be fair. But although the film’s limited runtime does truncate some of its emotional beats as well — the themes all come cascading down in the third act, laying out context that must have been much richer in the novel — the story isn’t unique enough to justify that extended of a treatment, either. In this case, a 111-minute Netflix movie suits the material just fine.
Still, as far as streaming potboilers go, the level of attention that’s been put into every aspect of The Whisper Man is above average. The cinematography, from the same DP that shot Mulholland Drive, is a handsome variation on the overcast look common to these types of movies. The production designer’s previous credits include Mr. Robot, and she brings a similar premium gloss to the suburban New Jersey setting. James Ashcroft’s direction is more contained here than in his last movie, The Rule of Jenny Pen — and correctly so, as going camp would have been a tasteless move given the film’s content. Still, he manages to get a split diopter shot in every once in a while.
The cast of The Whisper Man pull their weight.
The cast is also restrained: Scott edges towards hysteria as Tom’s search for his son gets more desperate and fatigued, but De Niro acts as a stabilizing force as a man who’s long since outgrown his mistakes, but knows he can never stop paying for them. Keaton keeps his psycho killer dry, while Monaghan is all business as the only person investigating this abduction who is technically authorized to do so. Saying that The Whisper Man is “better than it needs to be” would only reinforce the idea that it’s okay for Netflix movies to be disposable trash, but still: The effort is appreciated.
