‘The Whisper Man’ Review: Diverting Netflix Serial Killer Chiller Doesn’t Demand Much of Robert De Niro

“The Whisper Man” is the first — and surely not the last — film to be adapted from the airport oeuvre of British crime novelist Steve Mosby, who since 2019 has written four books (including the source text here) under the pseudonym Alex North. If he didn’t choose that nom de plume to evoke Alex Cross, the detective hero of multiple comparable James Paterson thrillers and their adaptations, then consider it a helpful coincidence. On screen, “The Whisper Man” certainly assists the parallel: As you’re watching, it’s easy enough to mentally recast it with Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd, and to imagine exactly the kind of pretty-entertaining Nineties potboiler that would have been. This 2020s version is pretty entertaining too: Now it’s Netflix fodder rather than multiplex filler, but it passes a couple of hours just as serviceably.

There isn’t even a drastic generational shift between that imaginary cast and this film’s actual one. In place of Freeman we have Robert De Niro, imparting grizzled gravitas without putting in a whole lot of noticeable effort as a former detective drafted into a grim serial-killer investigation, with marked similarities to a case he solved decades ago; in place of Judd we have Michelle Monaghan, ever doughty and determined, as the earnest younger cop trying to follow in his footsteps.

Adam Scott, meanwhile, could be replacing pretty much anyone as the anxious dad of the unidentified psycho’s latest victim; he’s also a bestselling crime writer himself, and the lesson to be drawn from “The Whisper Man” and “Hokum” earlier this year is that when Adam Scott plays a successful but grief-stricken author pursuing a quiet change of scene, extreme unpleasantness will follow. He also happens to be the estranged son of De Niro’s character, and the various dysfunctional daddy issues that spout from this reveal are the most distinctive feature of the script by Ben Jacoby (“The First Omen”) and Chase Palmer (“It”), otherwise a comfortingly conventional affair where detectives say things like, “Maybe this will jog your memory,” and where the usual suspects are very much the usual creepy suspects.

But that’s skipping ahead. The first father-son relationship at stake here is that between Tom Kennedy (Scott), the aforementioned author nursing recent widowhood, and his pre-teen son Jake (Acston Luca Porto), a sensitive loner drawn even more into his shell since losing his mother. Together, they’re seeking a fresh start in small-town New Jersey — relocated from the sleepy English village of the novel — where Tom has got things off to a fairly foreboding start by a renting a creaky, leaky old Craftsman home that is vastly larger than required. The house seems to carry plenty of its own echoey baggage, so it’s hardly surprising when Jake, already given to unsettling flights of imagination, begins talking to unseen figures outside the window or through the letterbox. Soon after, the boy walks out into the night, seemingly unprompted, and disappears.

But there’s no “Weapons”-style witchcraft at work here. Instead, Jake is merely the latest target of a serial child predator whose tactics are plainly modeled on those of Frank Carter, a now-imprisoned killer who lured his young victims with sotto voce invitations that earned him the nickname The Whisper Man — which endures, decades on, in eerie local lore. Having made the connection, lead detective Amanda Beck (Monaghan) turns to Pete Willis, the retired investigator who caught Carter back in the day, and who turns out, much to his own surprise, to have a familial investment in the current case. The roots of his estrangement from Tom, which has led to the latter changing his last name, are quite vaguely outlined by the screenwriters: The “original sin of fathers everywhere,” we are told, is that they can’t protect their sons. Case in point.

But “The Whisper Man” has enough plot to be getting on with without getting deep into the weeds of psychological backstory. The film’s procedural aspect ticks along just fine, holding the attention without subverting expectations, and carried by actors who, much like the detectives in this case, are ultra-capable professionals with no inclination to go rogue on us.

If De Niro never seems overly at pains to inhabit the character of Jersey cop with a cross to bear, his crumpled autopilot paternalism is still a warm asset to the film; Scott and Monaghan play dependably to type, while Hamish Linklater and Owen Teague bring dry flickers of intelligence to supporting roles. A streak of relish comes from Michael Keaton as Carter, brought in by the police to shed some light on these copycat events: He isn’t permitted to go full Lecter, but his cool compliance, with madness still visible behind wire-rimmed eyes, gives an otherwise by-the-book thriller a hint of perversity.

There could be more of that, considering “The Whisper Man” is directed by James Ashcroft — the New Zealander who made a far more characterful, ambiguous debut in 2021 with the Sundance shocker “Coming Home in the Dark” — and shot by Peter Deming, the veteran DP who brought such stark-shadowed dread to David Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” “Mulholland Drive” and “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Neither man does his reputation any harm here. Ashcroft keeps the pace steady and the atmosphere churning, while Deming conjures a more generic but perfectly effective air of menace in damp shades of brown and teal. “The Whisper Man” is out to chill your bones for a night, not linger in them for life, and that’s okay: The enjoyable turn-of-the-century diversions it recalls weren’t classics either, but we remember them fondly for doing the job.