★★★
This Uruguayan genre hybrid blends vampires, home invasion, snuff films and found footage with real ambition, shot and edited with more assurance than its clumsy script quite deserves.
Gustavo Hernández, the Uruguayan director whose debut The Silent House pulled off one of horror’s great single-take illusions, returns with a film that wants to do too much and mostly gets away with it. The Whisper (El Susurro) opens with siblings Lucía and mute younger brother Adrián fleeing a violent, vampiric father and taking shelter in a remote woodland mansion. Before long their cat brings home a human finger, and the film pivots hard: their neighbours are running a snuff film operation targeting teenagers. Vampires versus rapists, with a generational curse threading the two halves together.
The hybrid premise is the film’s most interesting quality and its central tension. Each strand works in isolation. The snuff-film threat in particular lands with genuine, uncomfortable force, generating the kind of dread that roots you to your seat. The script doesn’t always convincingly earn the junction between them, and setups and payoffs proceed in fairly predictable fashion once the pieces are in place. The script also has a tendency to pile on sketches of new ideas where it might have trusted its own atmosphere. But it’s always trying for something, and that goes a long way.
The craft throughout is a genuine pleasure. Cinematographer Santiago Guzmán shoots the forest mansion with real unease, and Hernández’s own edit keeps the middle section taut. Ana Clara Guanco anchors the film in a strong central performance, and Marcelo Michinaux carries entire scenes as Adrián without a single word of dialogue, quietly doing more than several better-written adult characters around him.
The film’s brightest idea is also its most formally inventive: a found footage strand relayed through a micro-camera fitted to a neighbourhood cat, its indifferent wanderings gradually mapping the horror next door. An increasingly terrified Lucía can’t stop watching it, on her laptop, in the dark, realising late that she’s not entirely safe herself. The sequence is genuinely creepy, and brought to mind Brian De Palma’s love of footage-within-footage. It’s more unsettling, frankly, than most of what surrounds it, but it’s reason enough to seek The Whisper film out.
The Whisper played at SXSW London