Jake Kennedy is missing, and it’s up to his father and grandfather to find him.
That search is at the heart of The Whisper Man, the spine-tingling new thriller based on Alex North’s novel of the same name. Jake (Acston Luca Porto) has been taken by a notorious serial killer known as the Whisper Man, and the clock is ticking on his recovery.
As mysterious cassette tapes of the Whisper Man interviewing Jake arrive, the police, led by Detective Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan), know they have to find the culprit before it’s too late.
But there’s one other problem: The original Whisper Man has been locked up for life, so whoever’s been abducting and killing children is someone new.
Desperate as hours turn into days, Jake’s father, Tom (Adam Scott), turns to his own estranged father, Pete (Robert De Niro), for help. “The moment that Jake goes missing, the one person who can help [Tom] is his father, who he hasn’t seen in 25 years,” Scott tells Netflix. “He has all of this resentment for him.”
In his past life as a police detective, Pete, now retired, caught the Whisper Man. But the case has haunted him ever since. One victim’s body was never recovered, and Pete’s drinking and obsession with the investigation lost him his family. “It was the characters and the father-son relationship that’s mirrored throughout the story that really made me sink down into both novel and script,” director James Ashcroft tells Tudum.
“The backdrop of this story is obviously this serial killer case, but we really examine that case through the journey of each of the characters and what they’re going through,” says Monaghan.
But the characters will have to put their differences behind them if they want to find Jake and end this new Whisper Man’s reign of terror. Easier said than done — but a child’s life is on the line.
Read on to find out what dark secrets lurk in the heart of The Whisper Man, now streaming on Netflix.
Suspicion in the Whisper Man case quickly falls on Norman Collins (Hamish Linklater), a local true-crime junkie with a home full of murder memorabilia. Tom spotted him trespassing in his basement, and he’s been visiting one of the Whisper Man’s cellmates. But Norman has an ironclad alibi and insists he had nothing to do with the kidnapping. An increasingly unhinged Tom attacks the other man — but the truth of Norman’s involvement with the Whisper Man is more bizarre than anyone could imagine.
A breakthrough comes when Pete and Tom find a pair of bodies in the basement of Tom’s home. There’s always been something off about the house that Jake himself picked — with the help of his mysterious imaginary friend, a young girl. At the time, Jake confided in his father about “the boy in the floor.” Now, Tom learns what Jake meant: Tony Smith, the Whisper Man’s fifth victim, is buried in the basement. And the corpse of another man, Dominic Barnett, is stuffed in the walls.
“Is it a coincidence?” De Niro asks. “We’re not sure, because Jake liked the house, wanted to move there. Tom is following Jake’s lead.”
Things begin to fall into place after this discovery: Norman made a deal with the incarcerated Whisper Man, trading him something in exchange for a grotesque visit with Tony Smith’s mummified remains. Ex-con Barnett was an outside liaison who rented the home before Tom and Jake moved in, and he gave interested parties a tour of the building. When he made the mistake of mocking his guest’s proclivities, Norman lost his cool and murdered him.
But even when confronted with these facts, Norman refuses to admit to kidnapping any children. And rather than spend his life in prison, he kills himself in front of Amanda and Pete, leaving the trail cold once again. The only thing the police have to go on: Norman says he paid the Whisper Man by connecting him with someone on the outside.
To find Jake, Pete turns to a last resort: speaking to the Whisper Man himself, Frank Carter (Michael Keaton). Frank has been obsessed with Pete since he was captured, and the retired detective is still the only visitor he’ll accept in prison. He’s even sent him hundreds of letters, which Pete keeps in a shoebox. When Tom finds the letters, he briefly thinks his father is in league with the Whisper Man. But in fact, Pete kept them as a reminder of his failure to hold onto his son, whom Frank mocks and threatens in the letters.
“This story looks at that dynamic between fathers and sons and healing wounds of the past,” Ashcroft says. “It looks at it in a very empathetic, nuanced way. And that all comes back to Alex’s book and the work that Chase [Palmer] and Ben [Jacoby] did on the script.”
In his first meeting with Pete, Frank makes a request: bring his family to him. When it’s denied, he turns to needling Pete over his relationship with his son and insisting that the Whisper Man only takes children who want to be taken. Jake came with the Whisper Man willingly at first, fresh off a fight with his father.
Tom’s relationship with Jake recalls his own relationship with Pete. And as it turns out, Frank is very familiar with Tom’s detective novels. “When you’re denied your father’s love, of course you mythologize him,” he sneers.
Shooting the scenes between De Niro and Keaton, who had worked together before but never shared a scene, made for an exciting day on set. “It’s like watching a good tennis match of the highest possible caliber,” Ashcroft says. “In many ways, [those scenes are] two of the most tense old-school action sequences in terms of really good dialogue, amazing performers, and this duel of minds that’s happening over the table.”
Hidden in Frank’s mockery is a clue, and Pete and Amanda soon crack it wide open. Who would Frank want Norman Collins to connect him to? Who would want to imitate the Whisper Man so perfectly? Who would mythologize him? While watching old footage of a police psychiatrist’s interview with Frank’s wife and son, they stumble on the truth.
The new Whisper Man is Frank Carter … Junior.
“He’s seeking his father’s approval,” author North tells Tudum. “He’s seeking to make sense of who he is in light of his father’s treatment of him and his father’s treatment of others. It’s very much about how we react to our upbringings — whether we run toward them or run away from them, or a bit of both at the same time.”
In a way, Frank Carter Jr. (Owen Teague) was his father’s first victim. “His motives are all about trying to please the father that could never be pleased,” Ashcroft says. “I love that moral conundrum of going, ‘I’m watching somebody who I feel sorry for and at the same time has got to be stopped.’”
But the discovery of the Whisper Man’s identity is only the first step. Tom, Pete, and Amanda still have to find him. Amanda’s first stop is the home of the police psychiatrist who interviewed Frank Sr.’s family all those years ago; Pete, meanwhile, opts to return to the source and interview the Whisper Man one last time.
“I get now why you always covered their faces,” Pete tells Frank. “There was someone you were imagining you wanted to get ahold of, but you couldn’t really get your hands on. Too painful, too messy, too close to home.”
Pete makes a messy decision of his own, promising to bring Frank his son if he tells him where Jake is being held. At the same time, Amanda has stumbled onto the location on her own. There’s a young man living in the police psychiatrist’s home, and soon Amanda has identified him as Frank Carter Jr. — and found the psychiatrist’s mutilated body in a barrel. But the new Whisper Man is onto her, chasing her through the halls of his home.
“It felt like a maze,” Monaghan says. “Going from room to room, they all connect on the second floor. Even shooting that space, it felt very discombobulating and confusing, and I think that the way in which we shoot actually, really, we lean into that a lot.” The new Whisper Man savagely incapacitates the detective and takes off with Jake in tow.
Frank Jr. is bringing Jake back to where it all started, and thanks to information from his father, Pete and Tom are on his trail. They chase the serial killer to Tom and Jake’s home, where a brutal fight ensues. Freeing Jake from the crawlspace where Tony Smith met his end, Pete sacrifices his life for one single moment with his grandson. “Run!” he tells him, just after the Whisper Man has stabbed him in the gut with a screwdriver.
“To solve this case and to complete his journey with his son, Pete has to give up everything,” Ashcroft says. “Pete knew that in stepping into this, that this was always going to come back in some way. This is his opportunity at finding personal redemption.”
As a little boy, Tom recalled having an imaginary friend he called “Mister Night,” a friendly figure who took him on adventures just before bed and kissed him goodbye as he fell asleep. In adulthood, he learned that friend was Pete, visiting his estranged son in the night and reading him stories. Now Pete is gone, and Jake’s imaginary friend is leading him off into the house to hide from a killer.
Jake hides upstairs, and Tom chases the Whisper Man to a final confrontation. “He’s really fast and strong,” Scott recalls of working with Teague. “I have to chase him upstairs and then fight with him. I think that it’s going to stretch the bounds of believability that I was able to hold my own with Owen.”
Fortunately, Tom has a little bit of help from the house itself. Earlier in the film, Tom noted a fragile section of attic flooring in the fixer-upper; now, Frank Jr. plunges through the floor and takes a mighty fall. The second Whisper Man has been vanquished.
The Whisper Man ends with a pair of reunions, one happier than the other. Tom and Jake are together again at last. They move into Pete’s home and honor his memory. Frank’s reunion with his son is far more violent. Admitted to his cell, he greets Frank Jr. with the same treatment he afforded his victims: a shirt over the face and a brutal strangulation.
Ashcroft draws a connection between Frank Jr.’s fate and Pete’s. “I think Francis somehow knows that by trying to get this approval and acknowledgment and connection with his father, that pursuing that and committing to that is the beginning of the end for him,” he says.
It isn’t the end for Frank Sr., who sends a letter to the recovering Amanda, thanking the detective for everything she’s done. With Pete gone, the Whisper Man has a new favorite police officer.
As Jake heads outside to play, Tom takes a look at some old family photos. What he finds there rocks his world. Among the images of Jake’s deceased mother is one of her as a child, matching the exact description of Jake’s protective imaginary friend.
It’s a twist lifted directly from North’s novel, and one of great significance to the author. “That was most important to me that they got it right, because that’s the heart of the book for me,” North says. “And I think they did a fabulous job of it. As soon as I started watching it, and you see her in the background in the car and in the first scene, I loved the way they were doing it.”
Ashcroft won’t say whether this revelation is a supernatural one or simply a child’s flight of fancy. “The imaginary friend has to work both as possible psychosis and/or possible supernatural intervention,” the director says. “I believe that it can be held both psychologically and supernaturally. And you can choose whether you think one way or the other or both.”
In a story largely about the bonds between fathers and sons, The Whisper Man returns to the maternal in its final moments.
“It’s an extra twist, but it adds an emotional layer that makes it really resonant,” Ashcroft says. “It unifies the family again, despite having [De Niro’s] character pass at the end and the mother character being deceased beforehand.”
The Whisper Man is now streaming on Netflix.
