Whistle is this year’s ‘Tarot’, which was the previous year’s ‘Polaroid’, which was the previous year’s ‘Wish Upon’, all the way down. Typical studio entry: Final Destination with extra scaffolding. Find a hook or gimmick to deliver grisly deaths, then craft a narrative around it. The cursed item du jour is an Aztec death whistle. Or is it Olmec or Mayan. Or any other place in Mesoamerica over a span of 2000 years. The script doesn’t know and finds it all interchangeable: get a death god from Guatemala, tell it to adhere to a Mayan calendar, and pass around the whistle. One gets the sense the writers had too many Wikipedia tabs open and just threw in as much as they could. None of the mythology or cultural appropriation really matters in favor of delivering gnarly deaths at a rapid pace.

The kills are certainly quality and there’s a decent buildup and internal logic to each, even if the wraparound film lacks any. They introduce some element of teenage excessiveness or personality trait that would lead to their demise, then proceed to enact that demise almost defensive about needing to explain it. There’s no reason to feel apologetic for a horror movie wanting to dispatch teenagers, and this film does that with relish. Jump scare, clock another to the body count, wash, rinse, repeat. Do the characters really matter? Nah. They get their one distinguishable trait, murdered, then onto the next.

There is an overabundance of CG to the film’s detriment. Lingering smoke trails and Gollum-esque specters that never quite sit in the same physical space as the actors around them have a distracting effect whenever they are onscreen long enough to look at, and that’s pretty often. Otherwise the direction is pretty sound, and the cinematography and use of color are actually commendable. There are a number of standout set pieces and the director can build dread and tension, but these notions just get abandoned quickly in favor of adding to the body count.

There is an 11th hour push to add thematic content and resonance to the main character’s arc, but it comes laughably in a ham-fisted monologue that makes me think at that point the writers had just given up or exhausted their coke supply. They made a pretense of gravitas, stakes and messaging, but just wanted to execute teenagers in grisly ways, and with that mission accomplished needed to get some sleep.

That this is slightly better than others of its fare in the genre is more of a technicality than a compliment. It’s the best version they could execute of a silly notion, but that doesn’t make it any less silly.