Serial killer thrillers have long been a reliable source of nightmare fuel, particularly when they combine a grisly investigation with something more personal. True crime is a huge boon for the streamers and, through that, viewers start looking for simply… crime. And it works for them. Netflix has leaned heavily into the genre over the years, and its latest entry brings Robert De Niro (Killers of the Flower Moon) to the fore.

Their newest thriller, based on Alex North’s best-selling novel The Whisper Man, has become a huge streaming hit since arriving on Netflix, climbing all the way to No. 1 on the streamer’s weekly global movie chart. When his 8-year-old son is abducted, a widowed crime writer (Adam Scott) looks to his estranged father (De Niro), a retired former police detective, for help, only to discover a connection with the decades-old case of a convicted serial killer known as “The Whisper Man.” The cast is led by Scott with De Niro alongside him, while Michelle Monaghan (The White Lotus), Michael Keaton (Birdman), Hamish Linklater (Midnight Mass), and Owen Teague (Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes) round out the cast.

Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz
What Action Series Would You Thrive In?
Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard

Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.

🐕Wick

🏁Fast

🧨Mission

🎄Die Hard

FIND YOUR FRANCHISE →

01
How does a room know you’ve walked into it?
Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.

ASomeone recognises me, and the temperature in the room drops without a single word being said.
BLoudly and warmly. I arrive with my people, and we’re already laughing about something.
CI’m the one who told everybody where to stand. I walked this room twice before anyone else arrived.
DBy accident. I wasn’t supposed to be here, and now I’m the only one who can do anything about it.

NEXT QUESTION →

02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like?
Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.

AEconomical and devastating. Trained technique, no wasted motion, finished before most people notice it started.
BLoud, heavy and weirdly joyful. I’m not elegant, I hit like a truck, and I always have backup.
CTo plan, until the plan breaks. Then I improvise at full sprint and refuse to stop moving.
DBadly, honestly, and with a lot of swearing. I take more damage than I deal and I still don’t go down.

NEXT QUESTION →

03
Who is standing beside you when it starts?
Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.

ANobody. I have contacts, favours and people who owe me, but when it begins I work alone.
BEveryone. My people are the entire point, and I’d trade the whole mission for any one of them.
CA small hand-picked team I trust completely, and I’d still take the worst part of the job myself.
DA voice on the other end of a radio and a building full of people who don’t know I exist.

NEXT QUESTION →

04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright?
Act two exists to find out what you’re actually made of.

AFocus, commitment and sheer will. Grief is fuel if you point it in the right direction.
BThe people counting on me. I don’t appear to have a limit when it’s family on the line.
CRefusing to accept the odds. Somebody has to do the impossible part, and it’s going to be me.
DSpite, mostly. And a growing sense that these people picked the wrong building.

NEXT QUESTION →

05
There’s a vehicle. What are you driving, and how?
No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.

AA black muscle car I am unreasonably attached to, and I will dismantle an entire empire over it.
BSomething impossibly modified, at impossible speed, off an impossible ramp. Physics is a suggestion.
CA motorbike at full throttle through a city I memorised last night. And then off a cliff.
DA borrowed car, badly, while somebody in the passenger seat politely asks me to slow down.

NEXT QUESTION →

06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders?
There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.

AThere are rules and I respect them absolutely, right up until somebody breaks one against me.
BI don’t take orders. I take care of people, and everything else tends to sort itself out.
CI serve the mission, not the memo. If my people are in danger, the orders come second.
DThey’re in a van outside telling me what I’m doing wrong while I’m the one bleeding on broken glass.

NEXT QUESTION →

07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for?
The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.

ASomething was taken from me that can’t be replaced, and I’ve been settling that account ever since.
BBelonging. I built a family out of people who had nowhere else, and I’ll defend it with everything.
CThe conviction that if I stop, people die. I don’t know how to hand that to anyone else.
DI just wanted to get through the holidays with my family. Everything after that was self-defence.

NEXT QUESTION →

08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you?
Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.

AThat I was a myth people warned each other about in whispers, and that they were right to.
BThat I never left anyone behind, the door was always open, and there was always a place at the table.
CThat I did the impossible part myself, every single time, and never asked anyone to risk it for me.
DThat I was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, who turned out to be very hard to kill.

REVEAL MY FRANCHISE →

Casting Has Been Completed
Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.

John Wick · Chapters 1–4 · 2014–2023

John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.

The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
work.

The Fast and the Furious · Fast X · 2001–2023

Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.

This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
defend it past the point of reason.
You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.

The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.

Mission: Impossible · The Final Reckoning · 1996–2025

Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.

This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.

You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
administrative error.
You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.

Die Hard · A Good Day to Die Hard · 1988–2013

Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.

Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
and then it makes you unstoppable.
You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.

↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ

Is ‘The Whisper Man’ Any Good?

According to the streamer’s latest viewership report, the movie amassed 33 million views in its second week. In its opening frame, The Whisper Man debuted with 23 million views, putting its two-week total at 55 million views. So it’s certainly a success in that respect. But in terms of critical response, less so. In his review, Collider’s David Caballero cited The Silence of the Lambs, Copycat, and The Bone Collector as influences on the film, while De Niro is cited as a highlight: “He brings a convincing weariness to his performance that reminds you just how great he is, even if he’s functioning at about 60% of his full capacity here.” The Whisper Man hasn’t received the same level of enthusiasm from critics as it has from Netflix viewers. The serial killer thriller currently holds a 46% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes from 78 reviews, leaving it firmly in “Rotten” territory, while its 39% Popcornmeter score from more than 500 audience ratings is even lower.

The Whisper Man is streaming exclusively on Netflix.

Release Date

August 28, 2026

Runtime

106 minutes

Director

James Ashcroft

Writers

Ben Jacoby, Chase Palmer, Alex North