Critics reviews

It is Porumboiu’s most elaborate feature and in some ways his least ambitious. Like a meringue or like a whistle, its substance is mostly air.

The Whistlers is consistently compelling, helped along by its terse stylistic efficiencies.

“The hardest game is a simple game.” With The Whistlers, Porumboiu seems to be attempting, for once, to play by the rules—to get his personality across within more stringent boundaries. And the results, mixed as they are, demonstrate something that’s surely understood by anyone who’s worked in a popular filmmaking vernacular: that the supposedly simple matters of genre . . . are very hard indeed.

Porumboiu’s first film to venture beyond his country’s borders represents a major stylistic departure, an attempt at integrating the director’s usual thematic concerns and low-key humour into a frantic, overwrought narrative with sadly lacklustre results.

The script may hum and buzz with twists and require concentration, but that's not exactly the same as being intellectually satisfying and rich the way Porumboiu's earlier work was. They were closer to profound; this is just clever.