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The Whistlers

Directed by Corneliu Porumboiu

2019

Romania, France, Germany

97 minutes

15+

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Maverick Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu (Police, Adjective SFF 2010; The Treasure, SFF 2016) returns with an off-beat noir in which a cop becomes embroiled in a high-stakes heist.

Cristi is a police inspector in Bucharest, who is one day approached by the beautiful Gilda. She entreats Cristi to help free her boyfriend from prison and retrieve millions of euros of secreted-away cash. Cristi, already under surveillance by his fellow cops, is seduced by Gilda and unable to resist her increasingly outlandish demands on him. Soon he is on the Spanish island of La Gomera, learning a secret whistling language to ensure that the criminal gang can communicate without detection. But in this strange world of Porumboiu’s creation, nobody can be trusted and those doing the investigating could well have ulterior motives. An entertaining thriller that’s wryly amusing and filled with twists and turns, The Whistlers is a marked departure for Porumboiu yet retains his trademark dark humour.

A polished mashup of genre motifs that suggests what might happen if the 'Ocean’s 11' gang assembled on the Canary Islands. Porumboiu is a cerebral director whose narrative style always comes equipped with a prankish spirit, imbues this slick ensemble piece with a wry agenda.

Eric Kohn, IndieWire

This highly entertaining but dense tale of a cop double-crossing both his department and the gangsters with whom he's in cahoots constantly corkscrews around in every sense, deploying flashbacks frequently as it reveals twist after twist. Porumboiu's recurring preoccupation with language, loyalty and the legacy of Nicolae Ceaușescu's repressive regime is still there, just approached from another angle.

Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter