A shadowy serial killer leaving horror in his wake. Exhausted detectives racing to catch him. A jailed murderer treated as the one man who might understand the monster at large, complete with the obligatory spine-tingling prison consultation. The Whisper Man plays like a classic 1990s serial killer thriller refitted for the smartphone age.
Even so, the new Netflix film — led by Adam Scott, Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan and Michael Keaton in a role with unmistakable Hannibal Lecter echoes — gives its villain a taste for old-school menace. Instead of encrypted messages or dark-web theatrics, he records his threats over battered En Vogue cassette tapes and sends them through the mail to traditional media outlets, as if auditioning to become a modern Zodiac Killer. The throwback mood is not limited to the movie’s tone; it’s in the heavy kachunk of the tape deck and the unsettling intimacy of a tongue sealing a postage stamp.
That retro DNA is hard to miss. The Whisper Man draws heavily from the wave of serial killer thrillers that followed Anthony Hopkins turning fava beans and Chianti into pop-culture shorthand for refined evil. Viewers of a certain age may find themselves transported back to the era when Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd, Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie — sometimes alone, sometimes in various pairings — pursued sadistic predators or became their targets in stories that flirted with real-world terror while sanding the edges into slick Hollywood suspense.
Without those defining ’90s serial killer movies — and the many early-2000s thrillers that tried to recapture their grip — The Whisper Man likely would not have taken shape.
The multiple Oscar-winning landmark — still one of the rare horror-adjacent films to receive that level of Academy recognition — became the starting point for a fascination that would dominate pop culture for years. It is brutally tense, profoundly unsettling, flawlessly controlled and endlessly quotable: “IT PUTS THE LOTION IN THE BASKET!” Once Hopkins’ Lecter, the original cinematic serial killer from hell, begins burrowing into the mind of FBI trainee Clarice Starling — played by Jodie Foster at the height of her powers — the film never lets go. It remains an all-timer, and anyone arguing otherwise may need their own psychological evaluation.
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Playing hardened detectives who’ve seen it all but not quite like this, Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt trudge through the rain — endless, drenching buckets of it — chasing a maniac using the seven deadly sins as thematic thread for his gut-churning murders. Director David Fincher is so good at generating bone-chilling atmospherics, if he had directed The Silence of the Lambs, it would’ve been downright apocalyptic. Anyway, I can’t even look at a cardboard box without saying, “What’s in the box? What’s in the baaaaahhhhhhhhhhhxxxxxx,” and then just calling it and going to bed because the day is ruined after invoking one of the most horrifying final-moment twists of any movie ever made.
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This gloomy nailbiter from ’95 stars Sigourney Weaver as a forensic psychologist, Holly Hunter as the detective, and Harry Connick Jr. as the wackjob who mimics the moves of the serial killers he admires. Perhaps that’s an unfortunate metaphor for the progression of the serial killer thriller. In a post-Seven world, the subgenre started getting samey, formulaic. But this one ain’t half bad, holding up fairly well thanks to its compelling performances.
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Freeman. Judd. You could theorize that someone shuffled the Seven and Twisted screenplays together if this one hadn’t preceded the latter. But the Seven star more than ably carries this one, playing a hard-bitten detective — note: there are never, I say never, any soft-bitten detectives in these movies — who teams up with Judd after her character escapes the clutches of Casanova, a killer specializing in sexual violence (ironic, considering the movie’s producer, Harvey Weinstein, allegedly assaulted Judd during filming). Derivative? Sure. But cable TV propped this one up until it spawned a 2001 Judd-less sequel, Along Came a Spider, which was a signpost indicating that this genre was creatively bankrupt.
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Denzel. Angelina. He’s a bedridden quadriplegic cop. She’s the cop on the beat. Together, they participate in what Roger Ebert called “one of those plots where a depraved serial killer leads everyone in a find-the-corpse version of “Where’s Waldo?’” Oh well. They can’t all be Hannibal and Clarice holding hands and gamboling through a meadow. But The Bone Collector lives and dies by the strength of its leads, who inevitably elevate this into a guilty-pleasure afternoon watch when you’re stuck on the couch with the sniffles.
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By my count, Ashley Judd notched three serial killer movies in her career, but none of her roles grind against her sweetheart persona more than this one. She plays a not-soft-bitten homicide cop who has a habit of shtoinking guys she picks up at bars. No issues with any of this — she’s a liberated woman, allowed to do whatever she wants — but the sitch gets hairy when some of those guys end up on the coroner’s slab, and therefore in her investigations. Did I mention she’s been experiencing blackouts that line up with the murders? This is what you call Bad Optics — or maybe Bad Coptics? And this is kind of a Bad Movie, but that premise is pretty juicy. Maybe it’ll hold up on a rewatch?
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DIRECTOR: Daisy von Scherler Mayer
STARS: Angelina Jolie, Ethan Hawke
PLOT: An FBI agent must catch a serial killer who takes on the identity of each new victim.
[Stream Taking Lives on Netflix] Photo: Everett Collection
I know. These “’90s-style” thrillers are spilling into the 2000s. Sue me. But show me filmmakers and studios who aren’t desperately drafting on decade-old successes in order to rake in some dough, and I’ll show you an entirely vacated Hollywood. Anyway: Jolie. She plays an FBI serial killer sniffer-outter summoned to Canada to ponder the clues carefully and meticulously and purposely left behind by the serial killer, because these guys get some jollies out of teasing the cops trying to bust ’em. Formulaic? Sure. But Ethan Hawke, Kiefer Sutherland, and Paul Dano turn up in supporting roles, and it all hangs together well enough to be passable.
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Denzel. He, Rami Malek and Jared Leto rummage about in a 1990s-coded cop-drama that debuted in 2021, so it’s officially capital-R Retro, a throwback that I remember enjoying even if I don’t remember a bunch of the details. So it goes? It’s gloomy, I remember that much. Oppressively so. Not a bad thing, by any means. Malek and Denzel are the cops, and no one is at all surprised to learn that Leto is a sleaze-ball, and by that I mean, in the context of the narrative of the movie. Loathe him or hate him, Leto’s an entertaining villain. And while Denzel has all the accolades he’ll ever need, he has an entire sub-career elevating so-so movies like this into recommended-with-reservations territory.
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Had to end with a banger — and the only film on the list based on a true story. Fincher does it again, casting Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., and Mark Ruffalo so he can psychologically torture them into a padded room. Gyllenhaal is a cartoonist with a knack for deciphering codes. Downey is a journalist so hard-bitten you wonder if it’s fatal. Ruffalo is a cop who looks like he sleeps 12 minutes a night, tops. Together, these three men bicker and squabble as they try to piece together clues and taunts left behind by the Zodiac Killer, all falling prey to the kind of obsession that nearly drives them mad. Leave it to Fincher to create a serial killer movie for the ages, about a serial killer who was never f—ing caught. Sleep well, my friends.
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John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
