A pan here, a rave there

Seen from a dark landing, a child sleeps in a bedroom lit by a nightlight while a curtain lifts at a half-open window.
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The book's whispered nursery rhyme made a generation of readers check the window.Licence: Generated, no third-party rightsThis image is an illustration generated for this article, not a photograph.

Netflix released The Whisper Man on August 28, and reviewers could not agree on what they had watched. In a review headlined “Robert De Niro sleepwalks through silly Netflix potboiler”, the Guardian judged the actor “on full checked-out autopilot mode” in a film it called cheap and increasingly uninteresting. Roger Ebert’s site went further, headlining its review “about as bad as Netflix originals get” and calling the film “an absolute waste of time”.

Variety saw something else in the same footage. Its critic called the film “a diverting serial killer chiller” that “passes a couple of hours just as serviceably” as the Nineties potboilers it recalls. Empire went further still, judging it “a solid serial killer thriller” that its starry cast lifts, and named a late scene between Michael Keaton and De Niro the film’s highlight. The Hollywood Reporter’s Spanish edition called it “sólidamente entretenida”, or solidly entertaining, though it found the ending less sure-footed than the setup.

The plot behind the split

Adam Scott plays Tom Kennedy, a widowed true-crime novelist who moves with his young son, Jake, to the New Jersey town where he grew up, just as a child abductor starts working the area. De Niro plays Tom’s estranged father, Pete Willis, a retired detective drawn back into the case. The new abductions echo one he solved decades earlier, when he caught a killer named Frank Carter, played by Michael Keaton. Michelle Monaghan plays Detective Amanda Beck, who leads the search and calls in Pete once she spots the resemblance to Carter’s old crimes.

Critics who disagreed on how much the film mattered still converged on where it falls short. The Guardian called director James Ashcroft’s work “a bland director-for-hire gig”. Both it and Variety pointed to a reliance on stock serial-killer furniture: a taunting prisoner, missing children, a suspect obvious enough to be a red herring. Ebert’s review named the cast chemistry as one of its many problems, writing that it is “impossible to believe that Scott and De Niro are related”.

Where the story came from

The film adapts a novel by the British crime writer Alex North, the pen name of the novelist Steve Mosby. The Russo brothers’ production company, AGBO, optioned the film rights in 2018, a year before the book itself reached shops.

Whatever critics made of the split verdicts, viewers kept watching. Within days of release, The Whisper Man had become Netflix’s most-watched film in several countries.