Director James Ashcroft gave John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush two of their more interesting recent roles in 2025's The Rule of Jenny Pen. Any hopes that the Kiwi filmmaker might similarly rejuvenate the career of Robert De Niro with The Whisper Man should be immediately dispelled. Here De Niro plays as bland a stock character as any uninspired screenwriter could conjure, the haunted ex-cop whose obsession with the one case he couldn't fully solve has destroyed his family life and left him alone to stare at the crime scene map he keeps pinned to his living room wall.
De Niro's Pete Willis did catch the killer he was after, a child murderer named Frank Carter (Michael Keaton) who garnered the nickname "The Whisper Man." But he couldn't track down the body of Carter's sixth and final victim. Pete is brought back to the case when Detective Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan) notes similarities between the work of Carter and that of a new serial killer who has abducted two boys, one of whom was recently found dead in a field. Pete gives Amanda the classic "I left that life behind me" speech when she asks for his help, but when his own grandson, Jake (Acston Luca Porto), is abducted, Pete is pulled back in.
This sees Pete reunite with his estranged son Tom (Adam Scott), a published author who moved back to his old home town with his son following the loss of his wife to cancer. Old wounds are reopened as the father and son attempt to put their differences behind them and track down Jake before it's too late. Amanda finds herself caught in the middle, worried that the personal attachment of these two men may lead them to scupper her case.
We've become so starved of crime thrillers in recent decades that even something as mediocre as The Whisper Man feels welcome. It's very much a throwback to the '90s, with the grey pallor of all those post-Seven thrillers and the old cop/young cop dynamic so beloved of that era. So much so that you might think it's actually set in the '90s until a character's cellphone starts to buzz. If you've seen enough of those movies you'll likely see every plot turn coming here, but there's an undeniable cosiness about The Whisper Man's familiarity. It's a movie tailor-made for someone who had a hard day at work and wants to watch a movie that is simultaneously for adults but won't ask you to engage your brain too much.
De Niro has phoned in so many of his recent roles that the bare minimum he gives here feels like a step up. To be fair, there's not much an actor can do with a character as thinly sketched as the stereotype foisted upon him by screenwriters Ben Jacoby and Chase Palmer (adapting a novel by Alex North). But there are small moments that remind us just how good the veteran actor can be when he's bothered. De Niro plays a quiet man here, and we can see a lot of pain running across Pete's outwardly stoic face. Monaghan also does a good job with a similarly uninspired character, and Keaton is suitably creepy as an AliExpress Hannibal Lecktor.
A straightforward thriller seemingly isn't enough anymore, and so The Whisper Man shoehorns a supernatural element in the form of Jake's imaginary friend. It's a clunky addition that director Ashcroft doesn't know how to handle, and every time it pops up it takes us out of what is otherwise a completely grounded thriller. It also leads to a final "twist" that the audience will see coming five minutes into the movie. The Whisper Man is an undemanding and serviceable time-passer when it's aping '90s serial killer thrillers like Kiss the Girls and Copycat, not so much when it's trying to piggyback The Black Phone.
The Whisper Man is on Netflix.
Directed by: James Ashcroft
Starring: Adam Scott, Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan, Michael Keaton, John Carroll Lynch, Hamish Linklater, Owen Teague
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