Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Whisper Man

In The Whisper Man, a film out on Netflix Aug. 28, Adam Scott plays Tom Kennedy, a successful true crime novelist who becomes the victim of a crime when his son is abducted in their sleepy New Jersey town.

An adaptation of Alex North’s novel of the same name, the film is about the search to find the young boy (Acston Luca Porto) alive. Kennedy’s estranged father Pete Willis, a former detective played by Robert De Niro, comes out of retirement to search for the grandson he has never met. As the detective responsible for the conviction and imprisonment of a legendary murderer known as the “Whisper Man”—who targeted young boys—he’s trying to figure out who is doing his bidding.

Here’s what to know about the complicated family dynamics in the movie and its disturbing ending.

Where The Whisper Man gets its title

The original "Whisper Man" is Frank Carter (Michael Keaton), who is serving a life sentence in prison for killing five young boys after luring them from their homes in a whispery voice. According to North, he targeted especially vulnerable children, exploiting those who were neglected or had difficult relationships with their parents, and was known for “whispering outside the windows and drawing them away from their family in order to take them [as a] Pied Piper kind of figure.” 

Twenty years later, Carter’s son Francis Jr. (Owen Teague) is the “Whisper Man” in the film, who lures Tom’s son Jake from his home. The movie suggests that he met his victims working as a child psychologist in a school. 

Complicated father and son relationships

The “Whisper Man” and his latest victim both come from families with sad father-and-son relationships. 

Frank Carter arguably targeted young boys because he was sexually abused by his own father and wanted to do the same to other children as revenge. He would specifically go after children who lived in difficult family situations. His son, Francis Jr., is following in Frank’s footsteps, trying to be like a father he never got to know. “He’s looking for his father’s approval,” says North. 

Tom and his son clash because they are mourning Tom’s wife and Jake’s mother—who died after a long illness—in different ways. For a fresh start, Tom moves the family to a new house and a new school in New Jersey. Jake, on the other hand, is slower to move on, carrying around what he calls a “packet of special things,” filled with doodads and pictures that belonged to his mother. Tom is also frustrated that Jake prefers to play with an imaginary girl in a blue sweater rather than make real human friends, and they get into disagreements in the movie over that.

When Jake is abducted, Tom reaches out to his own detective father Pete in an act of desperation, rather than for support. He’s always thought that his alcoholic father walked out on his family. During the search for Jake, Tom learns that his own childhood imaginary friend “Mr. Night” was actually his father reading him bedtime stories because bedtime was the only time his mother let his father visit him. Pete becomes a detective again, hoping he can finally have a relationship with his son and grandson.

How the “Whisper Man” is caught

The lightbulb moment occurs after Pete visits Frank in prison. Frank tries to get a rise out of Pete by saying his son writes true crime novels so he can be like his father. 

The comment irks Pete, but then he realizes that Frank is sort of projecting that maybe Frank’s son Francis Jr. is trying to be like his own father. Believing the “Whisper Man” who took Jake could be Frank’s son, he works with detective Amanda Beck and her colleagues to track down the young man, who doesn’t live far from Jake. 

A bloody ambush follows at the house where Francis Jr. is holding Jake hostage. Francis Jr. stabs Amanda, but she survives, though her injuries lead to a permanent limp. Francis Jr. stabs Pete to death. Pete’s first and last interaction with his only grandson is telling him to run out of the house as fast as he can.

Tom ends the film with fonder feelings about his father, as the final scenes show him living in Pete’s house. In the film’s final scene, Tom is looking through some photographs of his late wife that his son Jake has been hanging on to. He stops at a photograph of a girl in a blue sweater, realizing that is who his son’s imaginary friend is. 

Francis Jr. is sent to prison, where he gets ambushed in the end, by his own father, who strips naked and strangles his son. 

“Francis Jr. is the final victim of the original 'Whisper Man,'” says director James Ashcroft. And he says it’s natural for viewers to feel “conflicted” after watching the ending: “It’s not a fist bump moment of good guys vanquished by bad guys. That happens to some extent, but it's also a tragic story.”

He adds: “I love the idea of people walking away from a film in a gray space rather than the black and white one…That's what makes you have a conversation after a film. That's when a film exists long after the credits roll.” 

Capser Kelly hadn't heard the internet term "breaking containment" before I bring it up in our interview, but he instantly gets the idea. It's when something that's intended for a more obscure, niche audience unexpectedly goes mainstream. That's certainly what happened with Kelly's most well-known work. Nearly 12 years ago, a deranged, 11-minute parody of old sitcom intros called Too Many Cooks aired on Adult Swim at 4:00 a.m. When somebody uploaded it to YouTube afterwards, it went insanely viral—to the point where the normies at CNN parodied it.

Now, Kelly's breaking into the mainstream, so to speak. Although his brand of weird, horror-tinged comedy has been a mainstay on Adult Swim for decades, his first theatrical film, Buddy, is hitting theaters following a successful premiere at Sundance earlier this year. The movie, which is about children who are unknowingly trapped inside the world of a forgotten Barney-like television show starring a secretly sinister orange unicorn, is arguably one of the most normal things Kelly has made—which is saying something. 

"I asked my manager. I'm like, 'Is this too normal?'" Kelly recalls. "And he goes, 'No, but it might be normal enough that someone will give you money to make it."

At no point in making Buddy was Kelly deliberately trying to tone the twisted-ness down. "I really just try to do things that I like that interest me," he explains, noting that it's been pointed out that he seems to be very interested in being trapped. This feels appropriate, given our conversation about breaking containment. "If you like Too Many Cooks, this is me exploring some of those ideas of weaponized nostalgia and being trapped in a TV show, on a bigger scale."

Delaney Quinn (who was heard but only briefly seen as Rose Byrne’s daughter in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You) stars in Buddy as a young girl who starts to realize that something is wrong in the titular unicorn's seemingly happy world once another child goes missing. In the real world, Cristin Milioti plays a mother who suspects something is not right. Keegan-Michael Key voices Buddy.

The idea of a dark, twisted Barney—a subgenre Kelly calls mascot horror—isn't new, with Five Nights at Freddy's being the biggest modern example. Kids have been cracking anti-Barney jokes, like singing "I hate you/you hate me" to parody the purple dinosaur's loving message, for decades. Kelly says his own children knew the song, a version of which is a plot point in Buddy, from more or less the moment they first learned about Barney. "It made me wonder why he is hated, and interrogate that." 

"When I was a kid, I thought the kids lived in the TV show, and when I first saw kids breaking out into song, it kind of disturbed me," Kelly says. "How would they all know to do that? What's going on? Are they brainwashed?" Buddy builds on these innocent fears, telling a story about gaslighting and the hidden darkness that can exist within beloved authority figures. 

Between the relevant themes and the emotional arc, there is, in Kelly's own admission, a bit more going on in Buddy than in Too Many Cooks — and most of Kelly's earlier work, too. This includes Adult Swim shows like Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell and his two previous, non-theatrical movies, Yule Log and its sequel. (These last two Adult Swim films, which begin as normal footage of a fire in a fireplace before spiraling out of control into a meta-textual narrative about murder, time travel, and aliens, are feature-length but not exactly mainstream popcorn fare.) 

Buddy arrives on the heels of Obsession and Backrooms, two smash-hit horror movies whose young filmmakers, Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, got their start on YouTube. Most of Kelly's work has been on cable television, but his biggest hit became as popular as it did because of the same platform that helped launch Barker and Parsons. Buddy also has echoes of creepypasta—a term for scary stories that originated on online forums—and features a '90s-esque setting like Backrooms, too. Considering that Too Many Cooks went viral when the current generation of horror wunderkinds were children, does Kelly feel at all like an elder statesman of this internet-turned-theatrical horror wave?

"I feel elder, but I don't know if I feel like a statesman," says Kelly, who somewhat sheepishly describes himself as "safely Gen X." "I'm kind of breaking in late. I could learn from them as easily as they could learn from me." Though clearly well-versed with the world wide web, Kelly hasn't made much content specifically for the internet. He also doesn't quite see himself as a classical media man, at home in the more-established TV and movie fields. 

"I think I'm a person who's trying to do what I want to do, often through trickery, and not always in the world it should be in," Kelly says. One of his first jobs was making bumps—little animated interstitials before and after commercial breaks—for Cartoon Network. In one instance, Kelly turned these little pre-advertising bits into multi-part skits that could be edited together into a short film, like a Scooby-Doo parody of The Blair Witch Project that originally aired in mico-installments during a 1999 Halloween marathon.

Still, making a movie for movie theaters—one of the most traditional forms of mass entertainment—feels very overdue for Kelly. When Too Many Cooks became a sensation, it opened up a lot of doors for him. He had already created two Adult Swim shows and written for many other cartoons when Too Many Cooks came out, but it was the viral short that got him meetings. 

"Too Many Cooks gave me a certain baseline of confidence that I never had," Kelly reflects. "You know, like in Dungeons & Dragons, 'a +5 to confidence.'" He admits that he's kicking himself, a little bit, for not acting on that newfound confidence as much as he thinks he could have. "I wish I had done seven movies," he says. Making a movie was so important that he developed writer's block borne from anxiety. It was only when he was forced to finish a script for Yule Log on a deadline that he overcame the block. Now he's made "three and a half" films, if you count a segment he made for the horror anthology film V/H/S/Halloween. 

Kelly hopes Buddy is a containment-breaking success so that he can make more movies. But he doesn't want to think too much about where he fits into the future of horror cinema, which can be attributed in part to the fact that Kelly isn't just a horror filmmaker. Buddy, like Too Many Cooks before it, is funny. 

"If you go to a haunted house, you hear a lot of screams,”Kelly says. “And then they laugh afterwards." He doesn't, however, approach Buddy or anything else he makes from that horror/comedy binary. Though he's made a career out of works that explore the breakdown of reality, Kelly says he tries to approach things from a place of truth.

"If this happened, what would happen next?" he asks. And with Kelly, sometimes the thing that happens next is a big friendly-looking unicorn going on a murderous rampage. "Then I let the comedy and horror come in as it may."

Correction, Aug. 28

The original version of this story misstated the film festival where Buddy premiered. It was at Sundance, not SXSW.

If you’re still not convinced that creativity and originality are under siege, particularly in the movie business, look no further than the tangled tale of how the wholly joyous Coyote vs. Acme very nearly didn’t make it to a theater near you. As of summer 2018, the picture—a blend of animation and live action, adapted from a 1990 New Yorker article by Ian Frazier inspired by the forever-enduring Looney Tunes shorts—was already in development. In the spring of 2022, live-action filming took place in New Mexico. In November 2023, seeking a tax write-off, Warner Bros. Discovery decided to shelve the film; the company eventually agreed to allow the filmmakers to look for another distributor. After numerous false starts, Ketchup Entertainment acquired the rights to Coyote vs. Acme, which is why you’re now able to see the film in theaters, and eventually via streaming. In a world where entertainment conglomerates are clearly focused only on profits, this seems like a small miracle, which is why you should run—Beep beep!—not walk to see this late-summer delight on the big screen.

The premise is simple yet ingenious: After years of being zonked out by iron wrecking balls, of having slingshots overshoot the mark not by feet but by miles, of having dynamite blow his face off, Wile E. Coyote, a longtime consumer of ACME products, has decided to sue the company that has caused him so much misery. He has used all that ACME stuff for one purpose only: to ensnare the object of his eternal salivation, the tufted blue-and-yellow speed demon known as the Road Runner, both uncatchable and unknowable. But now, it seems, enough is enough, and maybe ACME is the problem. Wile E. enlists the help of a law firm specializing in personal injury cases (it’s called Avery, Jones & Maltese, a nod to three of the Looney Tunes’ chief architects, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Michael Maltese), and it's headed by Kevin Avery (Will Forte), whose specialty is getting settlements of a hundred bucks here or there from cartoon characters who have had limbs and such blown off—temporarily, thank god—by faulty products.

Coyote vs. Acme is set in a world where cartoons and humans coexist without batting an eye, so it’s business as usual when Wile E. shows up at Avery’s Albuquerque headquarters. Avery is pretty sure he can get his client a few hundred smackers for the defective rocket-powered roller skates our coyote friend has hauled in as Exhibit A. But then Wile E. unfurls, magically, a bundle including every single ACME product that has ever clocked his noggin or blasted him to oblivion: these million and one instruments of pain and suffering spring high into the sky, like magic rocks gone wild. Avery is still reluctant to sue the pants off ACME. But his niece and intern Paige (Lana Condor) persuades him this is one case that could really make a difference for thousands of disadvantaged cartoon characters, many of whom, including Porky Pig, Daffy, and Tweety Bird, show up in sprightly cameos. That’s how Avery finds himself up against ACME’s bulldog lawyer Buddy Crane (John Cena, who, with his square, precise jaw and squinty smirk, looks like a work of vintage hand-drawn animation himself). He also learns that Wile E.’s case isn’t isolated: ACME has long been involved in a nefarious plot to make millions by taking advantage of hapless cartoon characters.

Coyote vs. Acme was directed by Dave Green, whose highest-profile movie to date may have been 2016’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. But his confidence sings here: to say Coyote vs. Acme benefits from a light touch may seem odd—this is, after all, a movie where heads are clonked with mallets and facial features are rearranged by malfunctioning explosives. But the spirit of Coyote vs. Acme is everything. The script was written by Samy Burch, James Gunn, and Jeremy Slater; the voices of most of the characters—including Bugs Bunny, as a trenchcoat-wearing informant, and Elmer Fudd, as an earnest senator in charge of questioning “Mr. Runner” during a hearing—are provided by voice actor Eric Bauza, who clearly aced his studies at the University of Mel Blanc. Forte makes a fabulous foil for his cartoon costars: he never tries to outdo them, preferring to bow to their lunatic majesty. He knows they’re what we’ve come here for.

Because the Road Runner cartoons—which, along with the other works of genius in the Looney Tunes galaxy, made many of us the warped individuals we are today—were never really about the Road Runner. He’s moving too fast for us to ever get a handle on him; his job is to outsmart the coyote who hopes to catch him and turn him into stew, and he’s simply too good at that job. We know he’s always going to win, which makes him less interesting than his nemesis. Wile E. Coyote, with his conniving yellow eyes, a voiceless beast who communicates by holding up a series of signs scrawled with simple lines of dialogue, is the character we love in spite of ourselves. His untrustworthiness is his greatest quality; when he pretends to be nice, his canine lips turning up in a facsimile of a canine smile, we know it’s an act, and we can wear the joy of not being taken in by his deceptions as a badge of honor. It’s both funny and a little horrible when he goes splat into a slab of rocky desert clay, cutting a Wile E.-shaped hole into nature’s landscape. In Coyote vs. Acme, we almost feel something for him—almost. But in the end, he lets us off the hook; he will not let us fall victim to sentimentality. We're in on his con, and it's a pleasurable place to be.

Coyote vs. Acme is all about the little guys fighting, and winning against, a corporate behemoth. Could it be that Chuck Jones and his cohorts, by inventing a do-it-all, know-it-all company that could fulfill our every material desire, dropping off packages almost before we’d even placed an order, had in some cracked way foreseen the rise of Amazon? They probably couldn’t have imagined it, and it’s just as well, because the world they dreamed up—one of slapstick escape, of kerpow explosions that never did any actual harm, of faces and voices that we can summon in our memories as easily as those of our loved ones—is better than anything money can buy. In Coyote vs. Acme, the little guy wins, and we do too. Instead of being handed, in movie form, an exploding cigar that someone else thinks we want, we get the thing we didn’t know we wanted: a movie about a coyote, a bird, and a lawsuit, one that both speaks to our time and allows us, for the space of an hour or two, to escape it.