Robert De Niro Helps Hunt Down Serial Killer in Baffling Netflix Thriller

Netflix As with their horror-movie cousins, serial killer thrillers boast trademark elements—ritualistic murders; dour locations; jaded cops; baffling crime scenes; nocturnal sleuthing; shadowy chases—that can be pleasurable even when the stories they serve are underwhelming.

One must cling mightily to those throughout the course of The Whisper Man , a Netflix feature (October 28) which enlists Robert De Niro, Adam Scott, Michelle Monaghan, and Michael Keaton for severely inane nonsense.

A grab bag of genre devices barely held together by its competent headliners and ominous mood, it’s a passable affair only because it seems fated, from the start, to end up somewhere silly.

The Whisper Man fulfills that destiny, although it takes nearly two sluggish hours to arrive there.

An adaptation of Alex North’s novel of the same name from The Rule of Jenny Pen director James Ashcroft, the film opens with Tom Kennedy (Scott) and his young son Jake (Acston Luca Porto) relocating to the quiet New Jersey hometown of Jake’s recently deceased mother.

They’re a grieving pair, and not helping their feelings of isolation and despair is the house into which they move—a gigantic mansion that’s not only far too big for the two of them (it’s fit for a family of 10!), but creepy in a The Changeling mahogany-and-giant-staircases way.

Tom is a writer, and Jake is a loner who has a habit of speaking to his imaginary friend, a girl in a blue sweater whose identity is almost painfully easy to guess.

It takes them approximately 30 seconds in The Whisper Man to get acclimated to their spooky residence, but Jake remains a persistently morose child who misses his mom, and his condition isn’t aided by Tom’s discovery of a squatter in their basement.

Further stoking his nerves are the strange noises outside his window and, eventually, an encounter with a gloved hand sticking through the front door’s mail slot that also rattles Tom.

As this mournful duo deals with petty school incidents and testy home squabbles, The Whisper Man concurrently focuses on Detective Amanda Beck (Monaghan), whose search for a missing adolescent named Neil Spencer (Exavier Montanez) is complicated by her discovery of another boy’s body, shirtless and with a wrapped head.

With one look, Amanda recognizes this as the signature of The Whisper Man.

That notorious local serial killer was outed as Frank Carter and caught by Detective Peter Willis (De Niro), and upon visiting the latter, Amanda is disappointed to hear that the now-retired cop has little interest in opening up old wounds by humoring her belief that a copycat—or maybe Frank’s long-rumored accomplice—is stalking the streets.