The Whistlers, Cannes review: a crowd-pleasing Romanian thriller with twists to rival Line of Duty

Dir: Corneliu Porumboiu. Cast: Vlad Ivanov, Catrinel Marlon, Agustí Villaronga, Cristóbal Pinto, Sergiu Costache, Sabin Tambrea. Cert. tbc, 97 min.

Never underestimate the importance of local knowledge in The Whistlers, a satisfyingly clever, surprisingly high-octane narc thriller from Romania’s Corneliu Porumboiu, which gussies up its intrigue with a delightfully original method of passing on messages without police interception.

There’s a reason that the film’s criminals, aiming to launder 30 million Euros in drug money, have picked La Gomera, in the Canary Islands, as their attempted hideaway. It’s to do with “el silbo”, a whistled register of Spanish that the islanders have long used to communicate across miles of valleys and ravines.

You have to curl up your fingers and point them inside your mouth while puckering up – “as if you were going to shoot a bullet out of your ear”, explains one henchman. This is invaluable for conveying live intel without the risk of a phone tap, at least if you do it right: since it’s based on whistled translations of vowels and consonants, you can just as readily switch it into Romanian, making the likelihood of any eavesdropping very skimpy indeed. Eschew any notion right now, though, of using this mordantly complicated film as a handy instructional video.

At the start, a cagey narcotics cop called Cristi (Vlad Ivanov, great as ever) arrives in the islands to sniff out the whereabouts of the money, helped by a madly attractive local police contact, Gilda (Catrinel Marlon) who immediately must pretend to be a high-price hooker to fool any onlookers. They go so far as to have sex, in a hotel room full of hidden cameras, and the film hits its tone right on the head, with Gilda doing a bucking bronco routine in playacted throes while stifling any moves towards collateral enjoyment from the man beneath.

Scenes follow of Cristi being taught the rudiments of whistling, not by Gilda, but the employees of a crime boss called Paco (Agustí Villaronga), whose organisation revolves around a mattress factory somewhere outside Bucharest, owned by a small-time criminal called Zsolt (Sabin Tambrea), whose girlfriend Gilda happens to also be. Confused? This isn’t the half of it, as Porumboiu’s script starts weaving together a veritable spider-web of suspect networks, where everyone is very possibly screwing over everyone else, Cristi might be in it for the money or for Gilda, and his police boss Magda (Rodica Lazar) may or may not know precisely what he’s up to.

This is easily Porumboiu’s most crowd-pleasing film to date, with enough which-side-is-he-really-on? moments to rival The Departed, or at the very least Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, or a season’s worth of Line of Duty. The director’s customary craft sings from the start – there’s a very cool title sequence going through a road tunnel, with the light of the end of it neatly dividing the credits.

He’s very attentive to widescreen blocking, punchy edits and suspenseful sound design. The tech package, as they say, delivers the goods, and it’s the kind of filmmaking with rich confidence in its own professionalism, like a hired assassin purring with his own satisfaction after a devious, trace-free job.

There are definitely more profound films jostling for attention in Cannes, but as this story narrows down to the fates of Cristi and the aptly-named Gilda, it gains an unpredictable romance angle with heaps of old-fashioned, To Catch a Thief-style appeal: the icing on the cake is a wonderfully glamorous use of the Gardens by the Bay in Singapore, in the middle of their nightly lightshow, as a top-secret rendezvous.

Throughout, Porumboiu’s off-kilter sense of humour tilts its way in – one of the best jokes is more or less at his own expense, when a hapless filmmaker, hitherto unknown to us, picks the wrong photogenic warehouse for a spot of location shooting. Wrong place, wrong time, and none of the paraverbal linguistic skills to save his bacon. Anyone know what an el silbo wolf whistle signifies?