Based on the novel by Alex North (not that Alex North), The Whisper Man feels like a bit of a throwback to the kind of serial killer / police procedural movie we used to get a lot in the 1990s. I found it to be decent enough (it’s helped a lot by its excellent cast) until it goes into very blatant Silence of the Lambs rip-off territory later on. Had this precise film actually come out in the 1990s then I’d bet real money that it would have been scored by Jerry Goldsmith, would have featured some variant on the fanfare-type theme from U.S. Marshals at the heart of all its action and suspense music, which would then have been used as the basis for a sweeping finale cue that everyone would now have on their playlists.
The only thing that Colin Stetson’s actual score for the film has in common with a 90s Goldsmith is that the album is 38 minutes long. It’s interesting just how much the film music aesthetic has changed over those three decades (and three decades is, in fairness, a very long time – it had changed by a similarly radical amount between the 60s and 90s). These days the expectation of film composers in such films is that they make every effort to avoid drawing attention to anyone’s humanity or making any attempt to provide an emotional connection between the film and the audience (wouldn’t want to be accused of being manipulative, after all, despite that being the main reason that films exist). And that’s what Stetson’s score does – it’s all atmosphere, unpleasant atmosphere at that (it is a dark film) and the music’s adding a chilling further layer to what the visuals are already telling you. Don’t expect more than the occasional fragment of a melody – the very small ensemble the composer has assembled (indeed, from the movie credits, the instruments are all played by the same person – presumably not at the same time) is there for tension-building purposes and it’s all based around rhythm, a little like Thomas Newman perhaps at times. The tension is never really released even when everything reaches its resolution. It’s a deeply unpleasant listening experience, which in 2026 will have been what was demanded, but I rather hope I’m around long enough for the aesthetic shift back again to something a little more ambitious for Stetson and his contemporaries to be able to really show us what they can do.
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