The Whisper Man: No reason to eavesdrop

The Whisper Man (2026) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five); rated R, for bloody violence, disturbing images, profanity and suicide

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang 

Director James Ashcroft gets points for maintaining a consistently creepy atmosphere of unsettling dread, but that can’t compensate for a storyline that relies too heavily on coincidence, contrivance and just plain stupid behavior by the primary characters.

 

Tom (Adam Scott) and his young son Jake (Acston Luca Porto) initially are optimistic
about their move to a new community ... but they'll soon have second thoughts,
starting with the quietly malevolent house in which they've chosen to live.

Scripters Ben Jacoby and Chase Palmer have taken considerable liberty with their uneven adaptation of British crime author Steve Mosby’s 2019 debut novel (written under the pseudonym Alex North). For starters, the setting has been moved to the fictitious woodsy community of Garretton, New Jersey, still reeling from a series of grisly child abductions and murders committed two decades earlier by a figure known as the “Whisper Man.”

All these years later, children still frighten each other by chanting a macabre poem generated by those tragedies:

 

If your window’s left unlatched,

You’ll hear him tapping at the glass.

 

Disturbingly — as the film begins — a young boy, Neil Spencer, has just gone missing. The search team is led by local police Detective Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan), and the group discovers a body ... but this one is years decomposed.

 

Elsewhere, Tom Kennedy (Adam Scott) and his 8-year-old son, Jake (Acston Luca Porto), have just driven to Garretton, hoping for a fresh start following the tragic loss of Tom’s wife, and the boy’s mother. Depending on the camera angle, looking through the front windshield, there either is — or isn’t — somebody sitting in the back seat behind Tom.

 

As we soon learn, this is Jake’s special imaginary friend.

 

“Your mom always wanted us to move back to the town we grew up in,” Tom says. His relationship with Jake is loving, but strained; Tom can see that his son still is damaged goods, and he tries hard to compensate. Jake, in turn, carries his “packet of special things” wherever he goes.

 

So, okay; moving to Garretton is prompted by a valid reason ... but why did Tom pick this particular house in which to live? It’s a massive, ominous three-story affair, large enough for a family of eight, laden with huge, empty rooms that exude a palpable level of dread: completely impractical for just two people.

 

(As it eventually transpires, this house is a poor choice for several unpleasant reasons: merely the first of this dumb script’s numerous contrivances.)

 

So, they settle in. Jake begins school; Tom, a novelist, hopes this environment will help overcome a serious case of writer’s block.

 

A brief cutaway reveals poor Neil (Exavier Montanez) locked in a tiny room, being terrorized by a deranged hooded sicko, whose whispered platitudes are wholly at odds with his eventual intentions.

Montana Story: An unhurried, thoughtful study of grief

Montana Story (2021) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Trauma and disappointment drive us apart.

 

If we’re lucky, the nagging desire for closure might prompt a reunion.

 

Cal (Owen Teague) thinks that bringing an elderly, arthritic horse to upstate New York
is a crazy idea, but his half-sister Erin (Haley Lu Richardson) is adamant: She wants
the horse to accompany her back home.

Writer/directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel — working from a story by Mike Spreter — must be intimately acquainted with emotional pain. This quietly contemplative character drama is an unhurried, thoughtful study of grief, regret and — at times — barely repressed rage.

The often wrenching angst is driven by nuanced performances from Owen Teague and Haley Lu Richardson, as estranged half-siblings brought together as morose, somewhat reluctant witnesses to a crucial passing. The tone is relentlessly somber, the pacing just this side of glacial (likely too slow, for some viewers.)

 

The story begins as twentysomething Cal (Teague) returns to the family home and ranch in the big-sky landscape of Montana’s Paradise Valley. He has been summoned by tragedy: A stroke has rendered his father comatose and dependent upon life support and the patient attention of a full-time caregiver (Gilbert Owuor, as Ace).

 

The homecoming is far from comfortable, and Cal never comes close to rushing to his father’s bedside; he’s perfect content to leave ministration in the hands of Ace, a Kenyan immigrant who — no doubt a veteran of such vigils — likely is familiar with prickly family dynamics. Ace isn’t the slightest bit judgmental; Owuor radiates kindness, sympathy and understanding.

 

Cal is easily distracted by the mountain of mortgage debt and creditors’ statements that have long been ignored (nor does this surprise him). There’s also the matter of Mr. T, an arthritic, 25-year-old black stallion kept in the barn and cared for by Native American housekeeper Valentina (Kimberly Guerrero) and her adult son Joey (Asivak Koostachin), once a childhood friend of Erin and Cal’s.

 

The multi-ethnic casting is deliberate. We get a sense that Cal’s father’s many sins — unspoken and mostly unacknowledged, until the third act — include racism, and that Cal may have inherited enough of this tendency to be instinctively uncomfortable in Ace and Valentina’s presence … while simultaneously struggling against such knee-jerk behavior, in an effort to be a better, fair-minded person.

 

All of this remains unspoken; we infer and deduce such details, and likely back-story, via Teague’s thoughtful, richly layered acting. This is one of those cases where viewers’ likely unfamiliarity with his previous work — some may recognize him from the recent TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand — is an advantage, because it allows Teague to more easily become Cal. It’s not merely a performance; we recognize that this could be somebody living next door.