OTT Movie: The Whisper Man!

Psychological thrillers have always been a very popular variant of the larger genre of crime-mystery-suspense-detective-horror spins both for novels and movies—then for the television and latest for the OTT streaming platforms. The unfailing appeal of such sagas to the audiences of the world had its origin in the 18^th century as far as writing and publishing of Gothic fiction or dark romanticism-terror is concerned. Horace Walpole (1717-1797) is believed to be the founder of Gothic novels and his novel The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, brought the concept of haunted castles or mansions into literature for the first time and the novel has endured ever since, it’s still being read. Stories and novels of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Mary Shelley (1797-1851) and Bram Stoker (1847-1912) among quite a few others including the authors of the American Gothic fiction, and of course, the Bronte sisters, have been feeding the curious human mind ever since with almost all regions of the globe coming up with their own versions/literary translations/adaptations in both books and films and serials. 

Edgar Allan Poe’s dark scary intense stories, mostly as a reflection of his troubled and tragedy-filled life, express the terror inside the human mind and heart instead of the ‘external’ terror or horror of the various monsters, and I think this has a huge bearing on the psychological angle of numerous film productions of the genre in the following decades. He also introduced the concept of a private detective by publishing in 1841, possibly the first-ever detective story of world literature, Murders in the Rue Morgue, where private detective C Auguste Dupin investigates the murders with what Poe called ‘ratiocination’ or the method of ‘total and exact thinking’. This story has established the classic tropes of an investigator/detective forever and also paved the way for prominent authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie flooding the genre with Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot books. Poe’s first detective story was made into a film first in 1932 and the spill-over of Gothic Fiction into movies never stopped since—from film-noir of the 1950-60s to neo-noir of the modern era. The quantity-quality syndrome came into sharp focus after the boom of the OTT Platforms, particularly Netflix and Amazon Prime Video invading homes all over in the last decade, especially during the Pandemic. Now we have a blinding variety of dark-suspense-psychological ‘slow burn’ movies/series to choose from and most often we land ourselves with the usual mediocre stuff that seem to be hell-bent only on producing twist after twist, not caring a dime for logic and storytelling, usually leaving glaringly gaping loopholes in the script. However, there comes a movie or a series as an exception though in between the deluge, and the Netflix movie The Whisper Man comes, for me, as a much-needed relief.

The Whisper Man, directed by James Ashcroft and based on a bestselling novel of the same name by Alex North, released on Netflix on August 28, 2026. I was immediately attracted to the movie thanks to the great Robert De Nero playing a pivotal role, along with Adam Scott and Michelle Monaghan in the other lead roles. Michael Keaton is also a part of the impressive star-cast. So I went ahead and watched the movie on Netflix and found it quite absorbing, even scary at times and convincing on the whole, not carried over by twist-indulgence but drawing to a logical conclusion. It also has an element of the oft-used modern-day ‘magical realism’ that, naturally, is left unexplained and open to interpretation by the viewers. In my view, this element which was perhaps first used by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, adds to the dread, trauma and suffering of the characters of the film. The film quite successfully deals with the father-son conflicts over two generations along with a dark suspenseful psychological drama involving a serial killer.

I don’t want to dig deep into the story so as not to invoke the undesirable Spoilers Alert, particularly for the mystery-suspense angle of the movie! Suffice would it be to say that a novelist Tom Kennedy played by Adam Scott moves into a new quiet town with his little son Jake after the untimely demise of his wife. They come in at a time when the town is shaken by abductions and killings of kids by a serial killer on the loose. Soon after Tom admits Jake into the local school, one whispering night his son gets abducted for which a distraught father blames himself. He gets drawn into the local investigation led by the police detective Amanda Beck played by Michelle Monaghan, and inevitably comes in contact with his estranged father Peter Willis, played by Robert De Nero, who lives in the same town and who in fact, arrested the serial killer called ‘the whispering man’ thirty years back. The serial killer still lives in the town jail in an unstable mental state, and due to this revelation the investigations focus on finding most-probably a copycat serial killer. I’ll leave it at that. Let the film draw you into the vortex of the conflicts, leading finally to a terrifying climax.

The critics though have not been kind or even considerate to this movie with Rotten Tomatoes giving it a bad average score. No doubt, we find numerous films over the years that the critics haven’t been positive about; Rotten Tomatoes in particular has been known to give rotten reviews time and again to otherwise good films thanks to very unknown reasons. And in almost all such movies, the audiences have been very kind, often making those movies massive hits in the box office. The scenario is similar in case of The Whispering Man too, contrasting with Rotten Tomatoes’ miserly 46% the viewers delivering a rating of over 75% till now, since the August 28 release date. Hope you enjoy this slick psychological thriller! Super efficiently done by the makers and the performers while doing full justice to its adaptation from a book.