Kinda exactly what you’d expect from a straight-to-streaming hybrid of The Silence of the Lambs and Prisoners, The Whisper Man is a movie that seems almost aggressively committed to being a tidy, dour serial-killer thriller without ever finding much of an identity of its own. Adam Scott gives an eerily similar performance to the one he gave in Hokum earlier this year, while Robert De Niro turns in a late-period performance that isn’t necessarily completely phoned in (he’s done much worse), but the morbidity of the script and tone suffocates any possibility for either of them to really leave much of a mark.
The movie follows three generations of men from the same family who are all connected to the titular serial killer in some way. Pete Willis (De Niro) is a retired detective who put the original Whisper Man, Frank Carter (Michael Keaton), away decades ago, but a copycat has begun following Carter’s exact M.O. When Pete’s grandson Jake is kidnapped, he’s forced back into the investigation alongside his son Tom (Scott), with Detective Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan) rounding out the trio as they trade leads and chase down whatever potential suspects they can find before it’s too late.
For a while, Hamish Linklater’s trinket collector is the only person who gives the movie anything resembling a pulse. He’s a scummy weirdo who collects murder weapons and other pieces of evidence from famous killings and proudly displays them around his house like some sort of serial-killer memorabilia museum. It’s the kind of character that should provide a movie like this with some much-needed flavor, but even he gets swallowed up by how relentlessly straight-faced everything around him is.
Which is my biggest problem with The Whisper Man. It is played so self-seriously and so straight that it’s difficult to wedge your way inside and find an angle that’s either entertaining or particularly insightful. The basic construction is almost comically simple: serial killer is roaming the streets, therefore we need to find serial killer. There’s obviously nothing inherently wrong with that formula, but the movie never finds much of a fresh perspective on it, making it difficult to care about the procedural mechanics when the characters themselves aren’t especially compelling.
It also doesn’t help that this is such a dark and dreary watch without quite committing to the carnage and insanity that its own premise seems to promise. At home on the couch, it’s hard to stay locked in with something this morbid when the pacing is this sluggish and the movie isn’t really trying to get under your skin. Longlegs didn’t completely work for me either, but at least that movie knew exactly how to make you uncomfortable and leave you feeling like there was no hope by the time you walked out of the theater. The Whisper Man just kinda leaves you feeling nothing once it’s over.
That’s probably where this is destined to land in the larger Netflix ecosystem, too. Lots of people will watch it, relatively few will talk about it, and even fewer will remember that it existed a few years from now. That’s more of a biproduct of the streaming model than anything else, but it’s also hard not to feel like the movie itself is contributing to that problem. There’s nothing particularly bad here so much as there is nothing particularly memorable, either.
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It’s a tidy genre picture without much meat on the bone to chew on, and James Ashcroft never finds the angle that could elevate it beyond its familiar pieces. Silly that a movie called The Whisper Man is this serious and this hard to have any fun with.
I put this well behind The Empty Man, but a little ahead of The Bye Bye Man. I wonder which Man will be terrorizing us next.
Score: 4/10
The Whisper Man (2026)
- Cast: Adam Scott, Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan, Hamish Linklater, Owen Teague, Acston Luca Porto, Michael Keaton, John Carroll Lynch
- Director: James Ashcroft
- Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
- Runtime: 111 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: August 28, 2026
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