The Whisper Man Ending, Explained: Answering the Netflix Thriller's Biggest Questions
Based on James Ashcroft's novel, Netflix's new thriller film, The Whisper Man, is a twisted tale about the father-son bond.
The central premise of both the novel and the movie concerns father Tom Kennedy (Adam Scott) and son Jake (Acston Luca Porto). Tom and Jake move to Garretton, the town in which Jake’s recently deceased mother was raised. Shortly after, Jake appears to walk out of his new bedroom and disappears one night.
As Tom stops at nothing to bring his son home, he reunites with his estranged father, Peter Willis (Robert De Niro). Peter is a grizzled, former police detective who becomes entangled in the case after the town’s current detective, Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan), notices similarities between Jake’s disappearance, another recent missing child’s case and ‘The Whisper Man,’ a serial killer who abducted and murdered a string of young boys in the 1990s. As part of his method of killing, he would whisper to his victims through their windows/doorways and record distressing tapes of himself whispering to them as they talked about their fractured families.
The thing is, the Whisper Man (Michael Keaton) has been imprisoned for decades. So, in the film, Peter, Amanda, and Tom try to find Jake and uncover the copycat until it is too late. Here's how things wrap up, and the answers to three of the film's most pressing questions.
Naturally, the following article will contain major spoilers, so if you haven’t watched The Whisper Man yet, be warned.
Who Is The Second Whisper Man?
The second Whisper Man is none other than the original killer’s son, Francis Carter Jr. (Owen Teague). He is motivated to kidnap Jake and kill an earlier victim, Neil Spencer, in the same manner as his father after he was put back in contact with him through another prisoner and Norman Collins, a man from the outside who has an unusual fascination with serial killers and their so-called ‘memorabilia.’
As she is visiting the home of Frank Jr’s former child psychologist, Amanda is informed that the young man serving her tea is none other than Frank Jr., who had earlier killed the psychologist and imprisoned Jake in the house. Once she discovers this, Frank Jr. stabs her multiple times and escapes with Jake back to Tom’s home. He plans to kill Jake by suffocating him in a hole in the home’s basement, which is also where Frank Sr. killed his previously unaccounted-for final victim. Tom and Peter arrive in the nick of time. While Peter is fatally stabbed and Tom is badly hurt, Frank Jr. ends up injured after falling through the attack, which leads to his arrest and Jake’s rescue.
Why Does The Whisper Man Kill His Son?
When Peter visits Frank in prison, he works out why he always covered his victims’ heads before killing them — it was so he could fantasise about killing his actual son. By using Frank Jr. as bait, Peter convinces Frank to tell him about his and his son’s plans to kill Jake in Tom’s basement. This is how Peter and Tom end up at the house.
It is revealed that this promise to Frank is kept after Amanda, who survived her injuries, receives a letter from Frank thanking her and Peter. We are then shown a prison guard allowing Frank into his son’s prison cell. He takes off his shirt, asking for “skin-to-skin” contact. When Frank Jr. does the same, he violently strangles his son while the guards presumably turn a blind eye.
In terms of why Frank is so desperate to kill his son, director James Ashcroft tells Entertainment Weekly: “I think that the more influential aspect about the character is that in his son, he sees his own weakness. He sees the last time in his life that he was vulnerable as a child who was being abused and suffered trauma himself, which I think is a very real thing for someone to experience. But in Carter’s case, he’s somebody who cannot live with that level of vulnerability. And so he’s wanted to extinguish that for his whole life.”
Who Is The Girl In Blue?
It is established in the film that Jake has an imaginary friend he calls the “girl in blue.” We actually see her a few times in the film, too: she is in the car as Jake is being driven to his new home, she sits on his makeshift bed while he’s being made captive, tells him to scream when Amanda is investigating the home, and as he tries to escape Frank Jr., she guides him to the attic.
This leads to a pretty seismic twist ending. As Tom looks over some old pictures of his wife and Jake’s mum, he discovers a picture of her as a child wearing the same blue sweater depicted in Jake’s drawings. So, we know that the girl in blue is essentially Jake’s mother as a child.
The question is — is it a supernatural apparition or a child’s hallucinatory response to trauma? The answer is both. Or neither.
“We wanted to keep it intentionally ambiguous,” Ashcroft added during that same EW interview. “I believe in the natural and the supernatural world. And it was always something in the book that I was very passionate about. Even though the main question and the theme of the film is about fathers and sons, it’s very important to have that guiding presence of the mother always being there in the background throughout.”
He continued: “That was always the consideration, not only in the script, but how we shot her, how we framed her, where she was in terms of influence. Less is always more in cases like that. So that when we have that final revelation at the end, it becomes about emotion and that heartfelt feeling that has been there the whole time in the background — we just didn’t get confirmation for it. We wanted to keep that mystery alive for the audience so they could draw their own conclusions throughout.”
