‘The Whisper Man’ Review: Robert De Niro Classes Up a Standard Serial Killer Procedural

Robert De Niro has not lost his touch as an actor, but he’s gotten a lot more selective about using it. The acting legend still takes the same amount of roles each year, but the ones that he actually appears to care about have become fewer and further between. For every “Killers of the Flower Moon,” you get a couple films like “About My Father” or “The War with Grandpa” where his disinterest in staying on set for a second longer than he has to radiates through the screen.

At first glance, a direct-to-Netflix thriller produced by the Russo brothers seems like it should fall within the latter category. And perhaps “The Whisper Man” does. But by casting De Niro as a retired cop who is disinterested in getting back on the job when his signature case re-opens, the film pulls off a casting masterstroke that ensures we can’t tell if he’s doing a great job of feigning boredom or simply living it. In any case, he brings more gravitas to the film than it otherwise deserves. Pair that with an icy villainous turn from an actor Netflix has asked critics not to name and a by-the-book concerned father performance from Adam Scott and you get a cast that elevates an otherwise forgettable thriller into something watchable.

“The Whisper Man” begins years after the case of The Whisper Man was solved. Frank Carter, the infamous killer who lured his child victims to their windows with a Freddy Kreuger-esque nursery rhyme has been behind bars for a quarter century. The man who caught him, Pete Willis (De Niro), has been retired from public service for almost as long, even if there are still a few loose ends that haunt him. Thinking about Carter’s final victim who was never found helps him take his mind off his family life that’s in shambles. He had a falling out with his son Tom (Scott), a crime novelist who pulled too liberally from his own family dynamics for Pete’s taste. But the newly widowed writer has decided to move back to his childhood home with his young son Jake (Acston Luca Porto). It isn’t long before his quest for closure opens up old wounds.

The inevitable father-son reunion is a result of gruesome circumstances. A new child’s disappearance is eerily similar to the Whisper Man killings, prompting Detective Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan) to seek Pete’s council. Like all good Hollywood cops, he resists her requests at first and insists that he’s out of the game for good. But he changes his tune when his grandson is kidnapped, and he ends up diving back into a case that’s deeper and more twisted than he ever could have imagined.

Directed by James Ashcroft from a script by Ben Jacoby and Chase Palmer (who adapted Alex North’s bestselling novel of the same name), “The Whisper Man” is a competent, unoriginal addition to the thriller canon. Police cliches dominate the script — Tom actually says “You’re a great detective, you’re just a shitty father” while the two men sip black coffee in an empty diner — and the film’s reliance on the genre’s favorite tropes ultimately leads to pastiche rather than subversion. Even if there’s some real heart in the parental relationships at the core of the story, ham-fisted execution of police sequences like back alley fentanyl deals ruin any sense of immersion that it temporarily builds.

All of the unoriginality is executed well on a technical level. Almost every shot relies on a dark, icy color palette that distinguishes it from the excessively colorful imagery that you find in so many other Netflix originals. And while you can find quite a few other films of comparable storytelling quality on any streaming service, few of them boast this much star power. De Niro, Monaghan, and Scott all add a bit of heart to their otherwise two dimensional characters, and the best actor in the film is the one we’re not allowed to write about.

If you’ve watched every police procedural that the Netflix algorithm can throw at you and still crave more, you’ll probably find a lot to appreciate in “The Whisper Man.” But if that criteria applies to you, you’ve probably added it to your weekend watch list already. Anyone on the fence can certainly find better things to stream without scrolling too far down on their Netflix home screen.

Grade: C+

“The Whisper Man” is now streaming on Netflix.