There was a time when a new Robert DeNiro film meant an automatic ticket at the theater for me and I know I’m not alone. By the time DeNiro won his second Academy Award for Raging Bull in 1981 he had established himself as one of the greatest actors of one of the greatest acting generations in American movie history. However, in the early 2000s, when the actor founded his Tribeca Film Festival he started taking light roles in mainstream movies that no longer required the intense transformative performances that marked his greatest era and a few decades later DeNiro is better understood as an elder statesman of American movies who’s obviously more interested in building infrastructure and larger cinema projects than unforgettable moments on the screen. At this point, DeNiro gets to do whatever he wants, and when he wants to make a half clunky police procedural on Netflix he’s still one of the main reasons it’s worth watching.
The Whisper Man is directed by New Zealander James Ashcroft (Coming Home in the Dark). The film is an adaptation of Alex North’s bestselling novel with the screenplay written by Ben Jacoby (The First Omen) and Chase Palmer (It). Tom Kennedy (Adam Scott) is a recently widowed crime fiction writer who relocates with his young son Jake (Acston Luca Porto) to the quiet town of Garretton, New Jersey, hoping for a fresh start. Garretton was terrorized years earlier by a serial killer known as the Whisper Man. The predator targeted children, luring them from outside their windows at night with a voice so soft and sinister it inspired a chilling playground rhyme. The original killer, Frank Carter (Michael Keaton), was captured and imprisoned by Tom’s estranged father Peter (Robert De Niro), a now-retired detective. When children begin disappearing again and Jake himself vanishes, Tom is forced to reconnect with his father. Detective Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan) leads the investigation alongside them, and the trail suggests the Whisper Man may have had an accomplice who is still operating in Garretton.
The biggest problem with The Whisper Man is its many moving parts — the three generations of Kennedy men, the father-son relationship between the killer and his now-grown boy, the female detective who gets lost in this movie about the hard relationships between men and their blood, little Jake’s imaginary friend who serves no purpose other than a dumb reveal in the film’s finale, the unlikely strategy of a serial killer whispering at windows in the age of Flock and Ring.
There’s lots here to keep viewers at arms-length unable to suspend their disbelief, but this cast of ringers mostly keeps the ship from sinking. Everybody in the film is strong under the circumstances and if you can get through the slow moving first act, The Whisper Man gets better as it careens to its climax. DeNiro shares some touching scenes with Scott and his confrontations with Keaton might be enough to justify the movie’s a little less than two hours runtime. DeNiro can still hold a frame and ground a moment and I can’t remember Keaton playing a creepy baddie since Pacific Heights.
The Whisper Man is part procedural, part horror film given the somewhat supernatural presence of Jake’s pointless imaginary friend. The movie’s faults seem to come mostly from not sacrificing elements of the book for the sake of a tighter, more believable movie, but the film also proves that those problems aren’t anything a few great actors can’t fix.
The Whisper Man is streaming on Netflix.
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.