The scary possibilities of a spooky story told and acted-out with simple sound recordings and timely sound effects are stretched to their limit in “Undertone,” a myopic and creepy thriller that messes with everything between your headphones.
Basically it’s a radio drama for the podcast era, a two-hander with only our heroine and her comatose bedridden mother seen on screen. It’s about two podcast storytellers who stumble into a variation of the watch it/hear it/say it and you’re haunted by it trope — “Candyman,” every “Bloody Mary,” “The Ring,” etc. — and wonder if what they’re experiencing is real and a threat to their lives.
After 40-plus years of reviewing movies, it’s very rare that I hit on one that raises the hair on the back of my neck any more. But something about the intimacy and isolation of our headponed heroine, Evy (“Handmaid’s Tale” alumna Nina Kiri) and sound’s power to play with your imagination got to me.
Then again, I think the scariest Stephen King adaptations I’ve ever experienced were adaptations aired in binaural (3D radio) productions on NPR back in the ’80s.
Evy is sitting through the last days of a death watch with her aged mother (Michèle Duquet), a devout Catholic who has stopped eating and slipped into a coma. Evy gets instructions from an unseen hospice nurse and knows the “death rattle” she’s supposed to listen for at the end — after all the bedclothes and diaper changing that leads up to that in the American Way of Death. She is moved to re-listen to the last voice mail she saved from her mother, with Mom promising to “pray for you.”
But once a week, Evy co-hosts “The Undertone,” a podcast of “real” and passed-down stories of “all things creepy.” She plays the “in house skeptic” Scully to her old friend Justin’s (Adam DiMarco) more credulous Mulder in this audio-only “X-Files” team.
As she logs in and headphones-up with the distant Justin, he pitches this anonymous emailed set of audio files as their next show. They’re home recordings by a couple named Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas), who is talking in her sleep, and her mate Mike (Jeff Yung) who records her to convince her this is happening.
The ten audio files grow more dread-filled the further Evy and Justin go along. And as they split the episode into a multi-part series, true-believer Justin gets a lot of “bad feeling about this” vibes as they mess with the sounds emanating from Jessa, the words they make out from her voice played backwards and how that fits into the backstories of nursery rhymes of the “Bloody Mary/Lond Bridge is Falling Down” era.
“All childrens song are about children dying,” is one thread they wander off on. Skeptic Evy hears “hoax” at every turn, and throws around an understanding of audio apophenia and the way the mind plays trick on what your ears — especially those isolated by high-end headphones — discern.
Is that really “Mike kill all” they’re hearing from Jessa’s late night mumblings played backwards?
The podcast may go down the rabbit hole of songs played backwards, the mythology behind such nursery rhymes as the bizarre results of hearing a couple’s “talking in your sleep” recordings take horrific turns. But Evy’s got real life problems, starting with her dying mother, extending to her less than wholly supportive unseen beau and the two possible outcomes of her peeing on a stick.
The soundscape may be the vivid selling point of writer-director Ian Tuason’s gimmicky debut feature. But Kiri does a swell job of selling the rising threat level and Evy’s growing sense of peril with it.
The voice-acting all is all around fine. And when the narrative pulls out all the stops — abandoning just a whiff of its isolated-Evy-against-evil structure — that hair on the back of the neck thing returns with a vengeance.
No, there’s not much to this thin plot and the monotonous visual limitations don’t deliver the claustrophobia you might expect to heighten the growing dread. But for horror that’s alarming in the most primal, aural and piloerection ways, “Undertone” hits enough right notes to recommend.
Rating: R, profanity
Cast: Nina Kiri and
Michèle Duquet, with the voices of Adam DiMarco, Jeff Yung and Keana Lyn Bastidas
Credits: Scripted and directed by Ian Tuason. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:33
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