It’s been a big year for Adam Scott playing hard-drinking novelists. First came Hokum, in which the Parks and Recreation star played against type as an alcoholic writer who gets caught up in some spooky happenings at a haunted hotel. In The Whisper Man, his problems are more down to earth: Rather than ghosts and witches, his character — also a writer, and also a drinker — is faced with the very real horror of finding his son after the boy is kidnapped by a serial killer.
For Tom (Scott), this is part of a nightmarish cycle. When he was a boy, his father — an emotionally distant police detective played by Robert De Niro — caught a notorious murderer who went by the name “The Whisper Man.” If that sounds like a child’s imaginary friend, you’re partially right: This killer specifically targeted sensitive kids, abducting them and forcing them to create crayon drawings of their ordeal before sending them “under the floor,” as Tom’s son Jake (Acston Luca Porto) puts it. He even had his own folk rhyme: “If you’re lonely, sad or blue, the Whisper Man will come for you.”
