WARNING: This is full of spoilers. If you haven’t watched The Whisper Man yet and don’t want to know what happens, stop reading now.

I really liked The Whisper Man.

Until I didn’t.

Seriously, this movie had me for a while. I didn’t know where it was going, I didn’t know who I trusted, and I kept changing my mind about who I thought was involved.

The Whisper Man is based on the novel by Alex North. I haven’t read the book, so I’m judging the movie completely on its own here.

For absolutely no good reason, I didn’t trust Tom Kennedy (Adam Scott).

Okay, there was kind of a reason. It’s Adam Scott. I feel like lately every time I see him in something there is some kind of twist involving his character, so the minute he showed up I thought, Nope. You’ve done something.

I was wrong.

Tom was innocent.

Sorry, Adam.

Then Norman Collins (Hamish Linklater) showed up, and I knew I recognized him immediately. It took me a minute to place him, but he was Father Paul in Midnight Mass.

And Norman was definitely weird.

This time my radar worked.

When we find out Norman is involved and then he takes his own life while Pete (Robert De Niro) and Amanda (Michelle Monaghan) are questioning him, I thought, Ohhhh, shit. Here we go.

Because Norman wasn’t the Whisper Man.

Jake was still missing.

There were freaking bodies hidden in Tom’s house.

Obviously there was something much bigger going on here.

Right?

Wrong.

This was pretty much the exact moment the movie stopped surprising me.

The new Whisper Man is Francis Carter Jr. (Owen Teague), the son of the original Whisper Man, Frank Carter (Michael Keaton).

Of course it is.

Because apparently killers having sons who grow up and continue what Daddy started is something we haven’t seen in movies a million times already.

From there I started predicting everything.

Amanda goes to the house where Francis is living. While she’s there, she realizes who he is.

Well, obviously this isn’t going to go well.

She finds what she needs to find, Francis realizes she knows too much, and he attacks her.

Called it.

And can we PLEASE talk about Francis’s leg?

During their fight, Amanda gets stabbed multiple times and still manages to slash Francis in the leg.

Yet later this man is running around, fighting people and even STOMPING on someone.

Sir.

You were just slashed in the leg.

Maybe stop acting like nothing happened.

I can suspend disbelief. I enjoy horror movies and thrillers. I understand people in movies regularly survive things that would have the rest of us lying on the floor waiting for an ambulance.

But come on.

Then Francis gets Jake out of there and the police are pulled away from where they actually need to be.

At that point I pretty much knew where we were going.

It was going to come down to Francis and Jake, Tom would come save his son, Pete would get involved, and Pete was probably going to die.

And what happened?

Pretty much exactly that.

Come on, movie. At least make me work for it.

Pete gets one final moment with his grandson and is killed by Francis.

Tom goes after Francis.

Dad saves the day.

Then Francis falls through the floor and I immediately thought of The Housemaid.

Bad guy falls down and goes boom.

Except Francis isn’t dead.

Because we still have another predictable moment to get through.

Frank Carter has been saying basically the entire movie what he wants when it comes to his son.

So Francis survives, ends up in prison and eventually Daddy and son are reunited.

Guess what happens?

Frank kills him.

Exactly like he said he would.

Who could have possibly seen that coming?

Oh yeah.

Everyone.

Amanda also survives being stabbed multiple times because apparently the whole “OMG THEY’RE DEAD—just kidding!” thing is required in movies now.

And then we get the final reveal involving Jake’s mysterious little-girl friend.

Tom looks at old family pictures and realizes the girl Jake has been seeing looks exactly like his dead mother, Rebecca, when she was a child.

Ghost Mommy was helping all along.

At this point I just laughed.

The frustrating part is I actually liked this movie.

The beginning was good. The cast is ridiculous. You’ve got Robert freaking De Niro, Michael Keaton, Adam Scott, Michelle Monaghan and Hamish Linklater.

The bodies in the house creeped me out.

Norman’s involvement was interesting.

Michael Keaton and Robert De Niro sitting across from each other was great.

I genuinely wanted to know what the hell was happening.

Norman taking his own life should have been the moment this movie sent me down some insane rabbit hole.

Instead, it was the moment everything became predictable.

After that we got the killer’s son following in Daddy’s footsteps, the cop figuring out who he is and getting attacked, Dad saving his son, Grandpa dying, the supposedly dead cop surviving, the supposedly dead bad guy surviving, Daddy eventually killing his murderous son and Ghost Mommy helping from beyond the grave.

How many thriller tropes can we fit into one ending?

Apparently all of them.

And listen, I don’t automatically hate tropes. They’re tropes because people use them, and sometimes they work really well.

But this is supposed to be a thriller.

I shouldn’t be able to tell you what’s about to happen before it happens.

That’s where The Whisper Man lost me.

Before Norman died, I was sitting there thinking:

What the fuck is going on?

After Norman died, I was mostly thinking:

Yep. Knew it.

So was The Whisper Man bad?

No.

That’s almost what makes it worse.

It was good until it wasn’t.