Producers: David Gross, Whitney Brown, Macdara Kelleher and John Keville   Director: Corin Hardy   Screenplay: Owen Egerton  Cast: Dafne Keen, Sophie Nélisse, Sky Yang, Jhaleil Swaby, Ali Skovbye, Percy Hynes White, Michelle Fairley, Mika Amonsen, Stephen Kalyn, Mikayla Kong and Nick Frost   Distributor: Independent Film Company/Shudder

Grade: C-

A throwback to the high school horror movies of the eighties, but derivative of more recent frightfests as well, “Whistle” is premised on the notion of the inevitable doom that befalls those fated, for some reason, to die in a predetermined way and specific order.  In this case the cause of the serial deaths is a Mayan death whistle that mandates that those who hear it will be visited, and killed, by their own future demises, which appear in some graphic form.

We get a preview of what happens in a prologue in which Mason “Horse” Raymore, the basketball star at Pennington High, is distracted in the last seconds of a critical game by an apparition in the bleachers that almost prevents him from scoring the winning basket.  He immediately rushes into the locker room to destroy the ugly whistle, which he’s apparently used before, in a frenzied effort to save himself, but while showering he’s attacked by the apparition and spontaneously combusts.  The implication is that if he’d lived out his full lifespan, he would have died in a fire. 

Six months later Chrysanthemum “Chrys” (Dafne Keen) is the new girl at school, having arrived in Pennington from Chicago; the steel mining town, in Jennifer Spence’s production design, is so grim, with its rows of clapboard houses, that it must be located in northern Indiana.  She’s staying with her cousin, goofball student Rel (Sky Yang), who wakes her for the first day of classes.

Chrys’ parents are dead—it’s rumored that she’s responsible for her father’s demise and is just out of drug rehab, as new classmate, jock Dean (Jhaleil Swaby), is nasty enough to announce as they argue in the hallway.  Assigned Mason’s old locker, she finds the whistle in it (how it got there goes unexplained) and in detention after her altercation with Dean, teacher Mr. Craven (Nick Frost) takes charge of it, intending to sell it online.  But he becomes its next victim when he makes the mistake of blowing on it.  (As a heavy smoker, his apparition takes the form of a man emaciated by lung cancer.)

Ral fetches the whistle back from Craven’s office and takes it to a pool party where Dean’s girlfriend Grace (Ali Skovbye) sounds it off within everyone’s earshot.  The result is disastrous, with Grace succumbing to a gruesome-looking old spectral hag at the town’s fall harvest festival—a splashy episode at an event with a definite Halloween vibe–and Dean getting a foreshadowing of what’s in store for him, which will eventually be realized in a nasty CGI death sequence.  (The mediocre VFX is supervised by Matt Glover.)

Meanwhile Chrys has gotten close to Ellie (Sophie Nélisse), a pretty lass she locked eyes with during her initial spat with Dean, and the two take the artifact to Mason’s grandmother Ivy (Michelle Fairley), an archeologist who’s collected items connected with death from all over the world.  She explains how the whistle works—by accelerating the encounter with death that usually comes only when one’s allotted time has passed—and bemoans the fact that it robbed her of both her daughter and her grandson.  In a second conversation with the girls and Rel on her deathbed, she further discloses that the only way one can avoid its effect is by offering it the sacrifice of a different victim dabbed with one’s own blood—a necessary escape hatch if Chrys is to survive.

Fortunately, Owen Egerton’s script has provided a guy one would be happy to see take on the surrogacy in the person of Noah Haggerty (Percy Hynes White, who chews the scenery mercilessly), the youth minister at a local church who sidelines as a drug dealer armed with a switchblade and a smile.  This wolf in sheep’s clothing, who’s given entirely too much screen time, is key in an unduly elongated finale at some sort of machine shop, where Rel tries unsuccessfully to use him as a proxy and Ellie attempts desperately to save Chrys from her seemingly inescapable fate while threatened by the false prophet.

All seems to have been resolved for the lovebirds until a coda, set in the following fall, shows an incoming freshman (Mikayla Kong) finding the whistle inexplicably ensconced again in Mason’s old locker (don’t the janitors ever clean out these things?) and threatening the entire student body with it.  Is a sequel in our preordained future?  Given the quality of this movie, that seems doubtful. 

There’s a dutiful quality to “Whistle,” from Egerton’s contrived script to the committed but unimpressive cast, Corin Hardy’s uninspired direction and editing by Nicholas Emerson that’s alternately over-frenetic and droopily languid.  (The hundred-minute running time is at least ten, perhaps twenty, minutes too much.) Björn Charpentier’s cinematography is similarly schizophrenic, bland in the expository sequences and flashy in the menacing action ones.  Doomphonic’s score is emphatic, to say the least.

What’s perhaps most surprising about “Whistle” is how seriously it takes itself.  Unlike “Clown in a Cornfield,” another recent exercise in eighties horror nostalgia (and another that closes with a happy gay couple), it doesn’t go for a tongue-in-cheek feel in revisiting the teens-in-supernatural-danger template that’s been employed in movies from “A Nightmare on Elm Street” to “Final Destination.”  But despite the straightforward approach, you’ll probably find yourself laughing at it.