James Ashcroft's 'The Whisper Man' gets a first trailer and an August 28 Netflix date

Netflix put out the first trailer for The Whisper Man on Tuesday, and it came with a date. The film starts streaming August 28.

The cast is stacked. Robert De Niro and Michael Keaton headline a serial-killer thriller directed by James Ashcroft, the New Zealander who made Coming Home in the Dark and last year's The Rule of Jenny Pen. Adam Scott and Michelle Monaghan are in it too. That is a lot of marquee for a movie going straight to a streaming queue, and the trailer knows it. Most of its two minutes are spent on faces you recognize looking scared.

What it's about

Adam Scott plays Tom Kennedy, a widowed crime writer who moves his young son to a quiet town to start over. The son, Jake (Acston Luca Porto), gets abducted. The kidnapping rhymes with a string of child murders from twenty years earlier, the work of an imprisoned killer named Frank Carter, the man the tabloids called the Whisper Man. Keaton plays Carter. De Niro plays Tom's estranged father, a retired detective who worked the original case and gets pulled back in when the old pattern shows up again. Monaghan is the detective running the present-day investigation.

The title comes from the hook that made Alex North's 2019 novel a bestseller: a nursery-rhyme lure. "If you leave a door half open, soon you'll hear the whispers spoken." Carter got kids to trust him by whispering at their windows at night. The trailer leans hard on that image, a small voice outside a bedroom window in the dark, and it lands.

Ashcroft is the name to watch

De Niro and Keaton will sell the trailer. Ashcroft is the reason to actually pay attention. His two features are small and mean, and he keeps them under tight control. Coming Home in the Dark opens with a family picnic that goes wrong and never lets you feel safe again. The Rule of Jenny Pen handed John Lithgow a hand puppet and a rest home full of victims and trusted him to be frightening with almost no gore. Ashcroft does the quiet kind of menace, the kind that works on a couch at home as well as it does in a theater. That is the right instinct for a movie most people will watch with the lights on.

The script is by Ben Jacoby and Chase Palmer, adapting North's book. Hamish Linklater, Owen Teague and Will Brill fill out the rest of the cast.

The catch

Serial-killer thrillers built around a missing child live or die on restraint. Push too hard and it turns lurid. Pull back too far and you get a handsome nothing. North's book worked because it kept a real grief story running underneath the procedural. Whether the film holds that line is the whole question, and no trailer can answer it. What this one confirms is that Netflix spent real money on real actors and handed the material to a director who has earned the benefit of the doubt.

The Whisper Man streams on Netflix starting August 28.