Michael Andrillon | Staff Writer
Move over Candyman, Bye Bye Man, Invisible Man, Empty Man…
In being another addition to the “manverse”, I couldn’t help but find myself thinking back to 2017’s “The Snowman”, which isn’t a good sign.
Both are adaptations of best-selling crime novels that feature eccentric serial killers with a flair for the dramatic, and washed up detectives reeling from traumas that make the stakes intimate.
And just like that film, “The Whisper Man” falls short of intrigue with not much more than a rather stiff presentation of familiar tropes that doesn’t push its high talent to do much that brings out anything memorable.
Robert De Niro as Inspector Pete Willis & Michelle Monaghan as Detective Amanda Beck investigate a recent victim in “The Whisper Man” | Courtesy of Netflix
The title refers to a serial killer whose modus operandi sparks up again, as children go missing, only for ominous and perverse interviews recorded on old cassette tapes are sent to the authorities before their bodies are discovered strangled.
Even more concerning is that the “Whisper Man” has already been caught, and thus the question of who is carrying on the legacy of the incarcerated killer is left in the hands of Inspector Pete Willis played by Robert De Niro, and Detective Amanda Beck played by Michelle Monaghan.
At the same time, widower, author, and father Tom Kennedy played by Adam Scott, moves into a new home with his son, whose overactive imagination adds a little spirited nuance to the story, as well as a wedge that provides tension between his father and drags the family into the paths of the new killer.
Not a bad premise, that harken’s to stories real and fictional like the Zodiac murders and the movie/short story “The Black Phone”. And there is an attempt to heighten the emotional depth with darker themes of familial trauma and inherited grief to provide some curves here and there, but when even I can begin to guess the twists, then you’ve really hit too many familiar notes.
And what is with all of these Netflix works looking so clean and overly organized? For a story as gritty and macabre as this, everything is given that comfortable and familiar lens and framing that just begs for more visual intrigue. A few sets such as the home of the obsessive collector of vintage criminal memorabilia, and a decrepit apartment complex, actually do an interesting job of providing eye-catching visuals and much needed tense mood.
I’m mostly left feeling numb like a corpse, and that perhaps this case would’ve been better off left cold.
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