In today’s “writing it throughout the day” newsletter…
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Review: In Undertone, no one will hear you scream.
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Trailer: The Super Mario Bros. Galaxy flirts with “dark sequel” tropes.
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Streaming: Lionsgate’s War Machine is hot by default on Netflix.
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Box Office: Okay, Scream 7, NOW you’re The Rise of Skywalker
Oh, and super quick, The Hollywood Reporter is, uh, reporting that Tinseltown is tripping overthemselves to find the “next Heated Rivalry.” If I may be brief…
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You make more money from Yellowstone or John Wick than in trying to find the “next John Wick” or the “next Yellowstone.”
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More often than not, the proverbial “next XYZ” is almost nothing like the initial “XYZ.” The “next Harry Potter” was Twilight, the “next Top Gun: Maverick” was Barbie and the “next Game of Thrones” was The Boys.
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Good luck, but… (laughs/cries in The Dark is Rising, Pan-Am, The Event, Divergent, Outer Range and/or Suits LA).
I did not especially love Blumhouse and Paramount’s Paranormal Activity movies, but I did enjoy the specific experience of watching them as intended. By that, I mean I quite enjoyed watching them on opening night at a crowded multiplex. As I noted in my review of Paranormal Activity 3, the franchise was essentially the cinematic equivalent of Where’s Waldo, in that audiences could nervously scan the screen for clues as to where the next scary sight or frightening noise might emanate.
While the movies didn’t do much for me (although plenty of smart peers enjoyed the third entry far more than I did), I did get a vicarious kick out of watching the audience react like puppets at just the right moments. I was laughing with them, not at them, with not a slight amount of envy.
I offer this anecdote from what seems like a lifetime ago because I saw Undertone at an AMC-specific sneak preview held in Thousand Oaks’s Dolby auditorium. It was a packed house, to the point where I didn’t get my usual preferred seats despite buying tickets two hours in advance. And yet… the sound I mostly heard was silence.
There were little-to-no loud panicked reactions, no bursts of energetic nervous laughter, and no blood-curdling screams to be heard amid the 94-minute feature. But lest you think that my “It’s not scary!’ proclamations are merely that of a stuffy old movie critic, I can assure you those around me seemingly shared the sentiment.
Undertone is an unquestionably accomplished debut for writer/director Ian Tuason, and for a $500k, single-location chiller, it looked and sounded terrific projected onto a big(ger) screen. Moreover, a film need not be filled with popcorn-spilling jump scares or stomach-churning gore to qualify as a frightful engagement. Nor does a horror flick have to scare me shitless to win a passing (let alone superlative) grade, which, if that were the case, would mostly leave (offhand) Event Horizon, The Mist and A Quiet Place.
But Undertone is such a barebones experience, one whose impact depends on visceral and/or emotional action to onscreen incidents, that how it kneecaps itself leaves little else to recommend. The story of a podcaster (Nina Kiri, who is, as the only onscreen speaking character, in nearly every frame of the picture and is quite good) who starts listening to a handful of anonymously sent audio recordings whose contents get creepier as they progress, suffers from the same issue as many a “found footage” movie.
No, this isn’t a found footage film. Cinematographer Graham Beasley shoots the polished, meticulously staged “stuck in one mostly empty house” chiller to look, frankly, more expensive than its budget suggests. The gimmick is closer to an “ordinary characters uncover extraordinary circumstances from their singular, isolated POV” flick like Pontypool or Signs. However, not unlike The Blair Witch Project or a Paranormal Activity film, the rules create a film in which we know we won’t see (or hear) anything egregiously terrifying until the last moments.
After all, the characters need to be both creeped out yet not so terrified that they flee the haunted house or (in this case) stop playing the audio clips. However, since Undertone isn’t selling itself as “actual footage of something that actually happens,” there’s less of an excuse to play so damn coy. While I wouldn’t proclaim myself an expert on podcasts merely because I have one, the way in which our heroine and her friend (voiced by Adam DiMarco) conduct their show is far less believable than any of the scary sounds or disturbing discoveries.
The audio duo talks shop, eventually hits record, and briefly listens to the next recording until they get creeped out and put off the next proverbial “episode” or recording session for another time. The ill-defined nature of the “investigate real-world supernatural stuff” show, how it’s made and what entertainment value it might offer goes together with the film’s overall thematics. With Evy living in her childhood home to care for her dying mother, the picture banks upon viewer awareness of the last decade’s worth of “It’s about grief and generational trauma!” slow-burn horror flicks without offering any ideas unto itself.
Undertone gestures arbitrarily to the oft-repeated concepts without adding anything new or concrete, specifically related to this film. While understandably limited in terms of production value and scale, the A24 festival pick-up expects the audience to fill in the blanks while offering little tangible terror even in the allegedly cursed/perilous recordings. And it’s almost self-aware in this respect, sometimes playing like a quasi-spoof of low-budget single-location therapy session scare flicks and bemusingly name-dropping, at a critical juncture, the title of a far superior “Or… maybe you could just not consume the cursed content?” horror film.
Even noting the strong sound design, A24 dropped this sneak preview in Dolby for a reason; the impact quickly becomes akin to watching someone else watch a Paranormal Activity knock-off on TV without letting us in on what exactly is frightening them. I’m not huge on Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity (The Bay is my jam, natch). Still, at least those films offered picture as well as sound and/or something tangible (like a grim drama about three college kids realizing they are hopelessly lost in the woods) beyond the abstract notion of its “podcasters listen to evil audio, which might go badly” pitch.
The pay-off, such as it is, isn’t remotely worth what otherwise might have been a retroactively forgivable proceeding 80-ish minutes. Although, to be fair, the film does not end with a slam-cut to black followed by a black screen displaying text for a website holding more information. Meanwhile, Jason Blum has hired Tuason to helm a Paranormal Activity reboot. Yes, another momentarily popular franchise/brand that scored partly because it was clever, creative, and comparatively original is getting an IP-for-IP’s-sake revival because it is none of those things now.
And bringing Tuason onboard is depressing both because A) he’s an obvious talent and I can only wonder what he could do with even a Blumhouse-sized $10 million budget, and B) just because Chronicle rocked doesn’t mean Josh Trank was the right fit for Fant4stic Four. Obvious talent and craftsmanship aside, the simplest thing I can say about Undertone is that A) it did not scare or engross me. But that’s frankly less of an issue (local critic dislikes a film that other critics like, film at 11:00) than the fact that my seemingly dead-silent audience seemed to feel likewise.