The Whisper Man 2: Will Netflix’s New Thriller Get a Sequel?

Netflix’s The Whisper Man is out now, and the question that trails every well-received thriller is already doing the rounds. Will the movie return with a direct sequel? There has been no sequel announcement, and the film shuts its own door pretty firmly, except for one character.

James Ashcroft’s adaptation of Alex North’s novel follows widowed crime writer Tom Kennedy (Adam Scott), who moves to a new town with his son, Jake (Acston Luca Porto). The boy is soon taken by a killer copying the methods of the imprisoned Frank Carter, played by Michael Keaton.

Robert De Niro‘s retired detective Pete Willis and Michelle Monaghan‘s Detective Amanda Beck work the case from the other end. That finale is exactly why a follow-up is hard to imagine.

Alex North’s The Whisper Man Is a Standalone Novel But There’s a Catch

Alex North published the book in 2019 as a one-off, and it works because it was never really a serial killer story. It is a story about fathers and sons, and about the damage that gets passed down. Pete and Tom, Tom and Jake, and Frank and his son are the three pairs of fathers and sons who sit at the center of this story.

While Pete and Tom manage a late and partial repair, the relationship between Frank and his son was doomed from the beginning. The only relationship that actually gets a second chance is that of Tom and Jake. The film keeps that shape, which is also why it has nowhere left to go.

In The Whisper Man‘s ending, Pete dies saving his son and grandson, closing the one relationship the story spent two hours circling. Francis is dead too, killed by his own father in a prison room. Tom and Jake have also earned their ending.

That leaves Amanda Beck. She survives, she is recovering, and she has a letter from Carter waiting for her. We know that Michael Keaton’s killer enjoys getting inside people’s heads and has just found a new head to work on. If Netflix ever wanted a follow-up, that is the only opening: Beck on a fresh case, with Keaton’s Whisper Man taunting her from a cell.

However, Netflix can do something better than a direct sequel. They could adapt North’s second novel, The Shadows, and the only connection here to the previous novel is Amanda. She returns and chases another copycat killer, but this doesn’t have the Whisper Man myth attached to it. So calling it The Whisper Man 2 doesn’t sound right.

The Whisper Man Does Leave One Supernatural Story Thread Open

The one The Whisper Man plot point that never ties off is Jake’s imaginary friend. All through the movie, Jake talks about a girl in a blue sweater, and Tom treats it as a grieving eight-year-old coping the only way he can.

She turns out to be more than that. She is behind Jake’s insistence that there is a boy under the floor, which is true, since Tony Smith’s remains are buried in the basement. She is in the room with him while Francis records his tape. And in the climax, she leads him up to the attic and the weak floorboards that Francis eventually falls through.

Then comes the reveal. Tom, going through old photographs of his late wife, Rebecca, finds her wearing that blue sweater. Jake’s friend is his mother, appearing as she looked long before he was born. The film never explains how or why, but that ambiguity is the whole trick. It is definitely not a sequel hook, as a mother quietly watching over her son is an ending, not a premise.

M.N. Miller of FandomWire gave the movie a 7/10 in our review of The Whisper Man and shared that the movie generates an “atmospheric dread” and packs “an unusually spiritually profound finale.”

Do you think the film has the scope for a sequel? Let us know in the comments below!

The Whisper Man is now available for streaming on Netflix.