The Whisper Man

• Directed by James Ashcroft
• August 28, 2026 (Netflix)
• Based on the 2019 novel The Whisper Man by Alex North

When the son of a recently widowed novelist is kidnapped, he is drawn into the investigation alongside his estranged father.

From the opener The Whisper Man seems to confuse a relatively bland color palette and foreboding music along with characters standing there as if they are contemplating something with dama and action.

It takes nearly 30 minutes before much of anything happens and that’s when recently widowed Tom (Adam Scott) catches someone rummaging through his basement who rushes past him in a moment that is so obviously connected to the main issue but offers nothing worthy. I don’t need a threat right away but 30 minutes of people dealing with their emotional pain and anger just gets a bit much. Worse even a moderately attentive viewer can get a good look at the stranger’s face so there is no mystery in THAT mystery.

This is yet another movie where what should be the focus (in this case the search for a missing boy) is just an excuse to explore family and parental trauma between a distant father and son. It’s something that happens so often it borders on cliché and unimaginative. How hard is it to write a stable and relatively good father-son dynamic? They spend a lot of time while looking for Tom’s boy bickering with each other. Every moment of kindness by Tom’s father Peter (Robert De Niro) causes an angry reaction from Tom.

Extended establishing shot after extended establishing shot with characters looking or the camera lingering on an expression as if it has deep meaning caused my interest wain fill The Whisper Man. Mix that with a movie filled with sh!tty people and you’re asking yourself why you should even care as you slowly become tempted to put on a comfort film to ease the pain of this most recent mistake in your life. 

I can honestly say I have no idea how this movie ended. I was in front of the television the whole time other than a bathroom break or two but none of those occurred during the climax. This was so generally boring and devoid of anything worthwhile that I started looking at Stargate memes and only realized I had totally forgot about the movie when the end credit music played. And I had no interest in going back and figuring out where I dropped off. 

I just didn’t care about the characters. Nobody really stood out beyond the bickering father and son. The detective that was with them most of the time was just a generic detective. She was a non-character there to facilitate the story rather than have a personality of any type. Adam Scott-as-Tom swung between angry and panicked while De Niro looked defeated and not because his character was defeated. It made me think of a man who thought he could do better but was unable to understand why he wasn’t.

Michael Keaton has a generous cameo in this as the original Whisper Man. He gives the time we get with him his all and outclasses just about everyone. It is practically a given in a movie involving a copycat that you talk to the original, but it felt like it went nowhere.

There is some real talent in this wasted on a completely underwhelming and predictable movie. It is every intelligent killer cliché and twist found in better TV episodes and films. That is possible because those kept things tighter rather than allowing the production to drift along. Coincidence and contrivance come together here. How? Tom and son return to Tom’s hometown to start fresh and just so happen to move into the house where the final missing victim of the titular Whisper Man (whom his father caught) body is. The odds of that must be astronomical.

In The Whisper Man the son keeps talking to the boy in the floor. The question is: How does he know about the boy in the floor? I expected some kind of explanation. I just don’t know if the new Whisper Man told him about it and told him to do something. Admittedly I drifted off to other things in my mind but near as I can tell this is a question others have posited on the Internet, so I don’t believe I missed anything.

The Whisper Man is dull and so forgettable it will leave your memory before the end. Slap a fresh coat of paint on the wall and watch that dry instead.