Netflix’s Star-Studded New Thriller Poses One Real Mystery: How on Earth Did This Get Made?

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Just about every worn-out cliché known to the serial-killer thriller genre gets trotted out in the new Netflix movie The Whisper Man , from the first scene of a team of searchers spread out in a line as they make their way through the gray, drizzly woodlands of northern New Jersey to the movie’s grotesque, nonsensical climactic act of violence. The real mystery here is how a relatively inexperienced director (New Zealander James Ashcroft), with only two previous and obscure features to his credits, landed a cast that includes Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan, Adam Scott, and Hamish Linklater, as well as a special “surprise” performance by Michael Keaton that the movie’s publicists have directed critics not to reveal in advance of release, even though a mug shot of the actor is flashed on the screen within the first 15 minutes.

It can’t have been Ben Jacoby and Chase Palmer’s screenplay that won anyone over. Based on the bestselling novel by crime writer Alex North, The Whisper Man leans heavily on a creepy premise—the killer lures little boys out of their bedrooms by whispering at their windows—and assembles a rickety contraption of coincidence and plastered-over plot holes around it. There are lines of dialogue you can see coming from miles away, as when the main character, a widowed thriller author named Tom (Scott), drives with his young son, Jake (Acston Luca Porto, in the film’s only really affecting performance), to their new home. They wistfully mention Tom’s late wife. The kid is going to say, “I miss her, Dad,” I thought as I watched the scene. “I miss her, Dad,” said Jake. The dad is going to say, “Me too, buddy,” I thought. “Me too, buddy,” says Tom.

Of course there is a police detective, Amanda (Monaghan), obsessively pursuing the case of a missing boy in the very town to which Tom has blithely decided to move with his child of the same age. While searching the woods for the abducted kid, the police find the decomposed body of another boy. “That’s not Neil Spencer,” Amanda announces grimly, but who is it? This is never explained, and the victim is never identified or given any further attention. Given how blasé most of the town’s other residents seem to be about a string of crimes that would surely command nonstop national headlines, perhaps child murders are no big deal there?

Convenient coincidences pile up like unidentified underage corpses in The Whisper Man . It just so happens that the house Tom rents contains the secret grave of the final victim of the eponymous Whisper Man. That notorious killer is revealed to be none other than—one more spoiler warning here, for prudence’s sake—Keaton’s Frank Carter, who has been locked up for 25 years. Pete (De Niro), the now retired detective who caught Frank back then (how? Good question, but don’t expect an answer), claims to be indifferent to the similarities between the recent copycat killings and Frank’s decades-old modus operandi.