In crime thriller terms, Alex North’s bestselling 2019 debut novel, “The Whisper Man,” has it all — a terrific title, a psycho serial killer, a winsome and endangered child, a possible ghost and lots of family trauma.
For the Netflix film adaptation, you can add a truly stellar cast that includes Robert De Niro, Adam Scott, Michelle Monaghan and Michael Keaton.
In the race to replace the notion of “TV movie” with streaming-only films that could, in another era, compete at the box office, “The Whisper Man” is as good as it gets. While it does not achieve the depth or brilliance of its obvious influences — “The Silence of the Lambs,” “The Sixth Sense” — it is a twisty and very welcome reminder of an age when psychological adrenaline-thumpers like “Kiss the Girls” and “The Bone Collector” drew crowds to the cineplex.
Directed by James Ashcroft and written by Ben Jacoby and Chase Palmer, “The Whisper Man” has been moved from the U.K. to the U.S., and it opens with an overhead shot of an autumn woodland in New Jersey. The day is drear, the music ominous — and with good reason. Within the trees, Det. Amanda Beck (Monaghan) is overseeing the search for a missing boy only to find the corpse of another.
Unaware of this sinister preamble, Tom Kennedy (Scott) is moving into the area with his young son, Jake (Acston Luca Porto). They have sorrows of their own — a wife and mother recently lost to cancer — and have decided to start fresh in the town where she and Tom grew up.
Tom, a loving but overwhelmed father, is clearly going for some vision of small-town homey, a place to nurse his own pain while figuring out how to single-parent the quiet, creative Jake, who fears stairs and regularly chats with an imaginary friend known as the girl in the blue sweater.
While Jake copes with a new school and Tom unpacks, Amanda continues her investigation only to realize that the dead and missing boys bear certain hallmarks of the Whisper Man — a serial killer who abducted and killed five boys 20 years ago.
The obvious next step is reaching out to Pete Willis (De Niro), the now-retired detective who put the Whisper Man in jail. Back then, he had theorized an accomplice. Now he’s not so sure, and though still clearly haunted by the original case, Pete insists that there’s nothing he can do to help Amanda.
Until Jake is taken. His habit of murmuring to his imaginary friend leads Tom to ignore a truly terrifying incident that would have led any other parent to call the police. So, when he discovers Jake is missing, Tom feels guilty as well as frantic. In desperation, he reveals that Willis is, in fact, his estranged father and demands that he help find the boy.
As a terrified, grieving and furious father trying to control an uncontrollable situation, Scott is on fire here, and De Niro gives him plenty of room to work. Pete wants to reconnect with his son, but he has carried his own grief and fury for so long that they have become more shield than catalyst. But with unfinished business as both a detective and a father, he joins Amanda and his son in a race to find Jake.
“The Whisper Man” leans heavily on the twists and turns of its propulsive and menacing plot. A narratively helpful subplot involving a murderabilia collector strains credulity (though it does offer slyly self-aware commentary on our fascination with grisly murders). More problematically, Monaghan’s Amanda is given little to do beyond being a determined cop.
Even so, the larger emotional arc of family ties, with all their tragedy and imperfection, lifts “Whisper Man” from the typical confines of serial killer drama. Jacoby and Palmer allude to rather than lay out the details of Tom and Pete’s estrangement, the horrors of the original Whisper Man case and the origins of Jake’s imaginary friend. And in the hands of these performers, less is very much more.