I'm trying to not needlessly fatten up my 2026 rankings with a lot of streaming crap. When a movie gives off a whiff of being a quickie algorithm pleaser, instead of letting it flesh out the lower part of my rankings with just another in a sea interchangeable movies, I'm leaving it on the sidelines. As my post the other day about the two movies called Runner/The Runner will attest.
But you can't entirely disregard genre movies on streaming, so you're looking for certain key elements that would make you choose one over another. Netflix's new The Whisper Man ticks a lot of these boxes.
One of these is the cast. Adam Scott? Tick. Michelle Monaghan? Personal favorite. Robert DeNiro? I'm not as instinctively opposed to what latter-day DeNiro can offer us as I might have been a few years ago. Sprinkle in an unexpected Michael Keaton and Hamish Linklater? You're speaking my language.
But the real clincher for The Whisper Man was its director, James Ashcroft.
Ashcroft is a Kiwi who made one of the more dour and hopeless horror movies I've ever seen, Coming Home in the Dark, in 2021. I won't get into what makes it so depressing. But let's just say it's in the Funny Games category of bleakness. It involves a family put in peril on a camping trip by a pair of violent scumbags.
Then last year he followed it up with The Rule of Jenny Pen. This was a truly weird, in the best possible way, psychological horror? I guess? in which a menace played by John Lithgow tortures, figuratively and sometimes literally, a character played by Geoffrey Rush in the retirement home where they both live. It involves a hand puppet called Jenny Pen.
Neither of these movies are personal favorites, though Pen performed quite admirably in last year's rankings, coming in at #68 out of 184. I'm a bit more mixed on Dark, though in a weird way I think it might showcase the "real" Ashcroft a bit better and give us a better idea of the sorts of non-commercial films of which he is capable.
And then he goes and makes some true interchangeable Netflix schlock that has a good cast but not a lot else.
There are plenty of dour moments in The Whisper Man, to be sure. It might, in fact, push the envelop on this sort of movie more than some other films would, and there were a few memorable images. Overall, though, it's quite mid, and will soon be forgotten by me and everyone else who sees it.
Devoting a whole post to the notion of a director who "sells out" to make a more accessible film suggests that there is something particularly unusual about it. I won't say everyone wants to become more famous and make more money, but probably most people do.
I think the thing that caught my attention about this film is that Ashcroft's previous two features indicated the sort of person who wouldn't do that. One was incredibly depressing. The other was incredibly weird. This one? To the extent that it's incredibly anything, it's incredibly mid.
And it's not like Ashcroft had to take this project because he was desperate after the flop of his last film. I don't know if The Rule of Jenny Pen flopped or not, but he's releasing this one only in the very next calendar year, so obviously one project came right on the heels of the other. It wasn't "I'll take anything I can get at this point." (Technically speaking, Pen shows a 2024 release date on IMDB, but that was due to festival debuts.)
That sort of desperation does apply to another distinct talent who also made, in my estimation, a very mid film that I've seen recently. That's David Robert Mitchell, whose The End of Oak Street came only after he'd been fishing about for eight years following the box office failure of Under the Silver Lake.
Mitchell also gave us something that really showcased his unique vision in the form of It Follows, a big hit in 2014. He used that hit to follow up Follows with a sprawling noir that ran two hours and 20 minutes, and because even then his financiers were probably suspicious of its box office potential, it took another four years to get that one released. Predictably, it flopped, and a potential wunderkind -- someone I was thinking in the same category as Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, who also had prestige horror hits around that time -- went into the wilderness for the better part of a decade.
It was more clear that The End of Oak Street was a compromise in his vision, even if it has some surprises that are the kind of thing that might have intrigued someone like Mitchell. He actually wrote it, so there's no suggestion this was a director-for-hire project. But clearly he said "I have to make something that is not a sprawling 140-minute noir," and what came of that was a dinosaur movie involving music by Michael Giacchino.
I know some people like this more than I do, so your mileage may vary. But whatever you think about it, there's no doubt you never thought of this as the logical next movie from the guy who made It Follows and Under the Silver Lake.
And then also this week I saw a movie by a man who had the same eight-year layoff between features as Mitchell, but he went a different path.
Boots Riley got critical acclaim, but probably not much box office either, for his 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. He was not entirely in the wilderness for the years in between, because he made a TV show called I Am a Virgo, but I have to assume he would have been able to make a follow-up feature sooner if Bother had been just a bit more successful and a bit less idiosyncratic in its vision.
So what did Riley do for his follow-up?
He made I Love Boosters, which I saw and quite liked on Sunday, and which is, if anything, even a bit weirder than Sorry to Bother You.
I wouldn't say I love either of Riley's films, though I highly respect both of them and they naturally excite me for anything he might make next. The question is, though, whether it'll be another eight years or longer until the next Riley feature, given the lack of money Boosters surely made. (I could be consulting actual box office figures here, but my point works even in the abstract.)
It seems that Riley prefers his artistic vision to the ability to make movies on the regular. That's a brave decision, and if it's going to be his fate, I hope the hossanas for his previous features are enough to nourish him, artistically, while he waits for his next opportunity.
And if I see his name attached to The Whisper Man 2, well, I will be disappointed.
