This teen horror film operates very much in the mould of ‘Final Destination’. Here, an ancient Aztec death whistle turns up in a school locker, and whoever blows it triggers a chain reaction that ultimately leads to the deaths of everyone who hears its sound. Like ‘The Craft’ from 1996, the story centres on a group of teenage misfits – one struggling with drug addiction following her father’s death in which she may have been implicated – who become drawn into forces far beyond their control. The setting, a gloomy industrial steel town, proves surprisingly effective, giving the film a bleak atmosphere that suits its fatalistic premise.

There’s also a memorably eerie sequence set in a harvest-festival maze, where the expectation that a masked figure will simply be another costumed student gives way to something far more sinister. The film’s key twist is that everyone is destined to die anyway: the whistle merely brings death forward. If a character was meant to die decades later – perhaps from terminal illness, like the chain-smoking schoolteacher played against type by Nick Frost – that same fate arrives prematurely. Visually, this is rendered through disturbing images of older versions of the victims appearing to destroy their younger selves, sometimes literally reaching into their brains and causing instant death.

One especially chilling scene involves a character destined for a future car crash; while alone in his bedroom, the fatal accident seems to unfold invisibly around him, his body mangling as though caught in the collision. The sound design makes the moment particularly gruesome and visceral. The film also recalls 1997’s ‘The Relic’, with its idea of an ancient curse transported from another culture into an unsuspecting modern community.

Like ‘Final Destination’, the narrative revolves around the inevitability of death and the ingenuity of characters attempting to cheat it – even experimenting with temporary death and resuscitation to escape fate. Whether death can truly be outwitted becomes the central question. Still, the structure remains familiar: one character dies, then the next, giving the film an unavoidable sense of sequence and inevitability. Ultimately, ‘Whistle’ doesn’t pretend to be anything more than it is – but as glossy, unapologetically trashy B-movie horror, it’s a particularly effective example of the form.