The first thing you notice about undertone is how quiet it is; not just in its audio mix, but in how it’s shot — primarily steady wide shots that slowly pan across empty rooms, allowing your eyes to frantically scan for something amiss. It’s an understated form of filmmaking that allows for the movie’s scares to hit all that much harder. And when those scares do come, they’ll linger with you for an astonishingly long time.
The film follows Evy (Nina Kiri), the resident skeptic on a paranormal podcast that she co-hosts with her old friend Justin (Adam DiMarco). Justin, the believer, receives a strange series of audio files sent by an anonymous email and shares them with Evy live on the podcast. The recordings appear to be of a couple, Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas) and Mike (Jeff Yung), who start recording themselves at night after Jessa starts speaking mysteriously in her sleep. But as the recordings continue, the sounds they catch become more sinister and appear to start influencing Evy’s life in more and more threatening ways.
The central conceit — and great strength — of undertone is that Evy and her ailing mother (Michèle Duquet) are the only people who appear onscreen throughout the film. Evy moved into her mother’s house to take care of her during her terminal illness, and essentially spends her time housebound waiting for her mother to pass. Her podcast, which Evy records at 3 a.m. to accommodate Justin’s U.K. schedule, remains her only source of comfort. All of these things, along with an absent boyfriend who calls occasionally to lure Evy out of the house, compound into the perfect cocktail of stressors for Evy to become the next victim of the demonic curse unleashed by the audio recordings.
At first, Evy is the consummate skeptic. The early recordings reveal that Jessa has been singing children’s songs in her sleep, which she has no memory of when she wakes. Jessa and Mike are about to have a baby, Evy explains, of course, children will be on her mind. But Justin giddily takes them down the rabbit hole of conspiracies around children’s songs played backwards, which Evy begrudgingly follows. Things turn even stranger when Jessa begins speaking gibberish, which Justin and Evy discover is a backwards chant summoning a demon. Meanwhile, things start to go bump in the night at Evy’s house. Her mother, all but comatose in her bed, appears to move in the night. Faucets turn on of their own will. And the dozens of Christian paraphernalia littered around the creaky, dusty house — Evy’s mother was deeply religious — start to appear slightly off; one statuette of the Virgin Mary keeps showing up at her mother’s bedside table, each time with more babies crawling up her robes.
Undertone lingers on empty space, building up a sense of dread until your nerves are frayed.
A24
To be fair, undertone isn’t doing anything new in the way of demon possession movies or even haunted house movies — in fact, the audio recordings of Jessa and Mike are pretty much like if you were simply listening to Paranormal Activity. But like Paranormal Activity before it, undertone feels like a bold, new evolution of the horror movie. Because of writer-director Ian Tuason’s steady direction and Kiri’s strong central performance — steely and vulnerable at the same time — undertone’s audio-centric conceit doesn’t feel like too much of a gimmick. It’s sparse where it needs to be and employs its jump scares well — often choosing to withhold rather than go for the typical jump scare. Undertone’s central idea of a cursed media file passing along from one person to the next will draw more than a few comparisons to The Ring, but in fact, it’s the film’s withholding nature that is most simular to the original Japanese Ringu, a movie that was defined by slowly building its dread until it reached a deadly climax in the final minutes.
Similarly, undertone plays with the expectations of any seasoned horror movie watcher: a bathroom cabinet mirror swings open and close to reveal nothing, a slow pan across a room offers only empty corners. Indeed, the scariest parts of undertone are what’s unseen: the terrifying climax literally taking place when the film cuts to black, with only Evy’s screams and inhuman noises to keep us company. It’s a testament to the film’s pristine audio production (best seen in Dolby Atmos, or better yet, through your own headphones) that such a scene can be so terrifying and chilling with nothing happening onscreen.
Many horror movies have attempted to bring to life the feeling of reading a creepypasta — an internet urban myth that spreads through the darkened corners of 4chan threads or obscure YouTube links. But undertone is the rare movie to nail that feeling of accidentally tapping into something purely evil by clicking on a wrong link or lingering too long in a digital rabbit hole. It’s a terrifying new thriller for the internet age, one that will stay under your skin long after the credits roll.
Undertone is playing in theaters now.