Review: undertone

Director:  Ian Tuason

Stars:  Nina Kiri, Michèle Duquet, Adam DiMarco

What’s in a name? The latest horror aboard the A24 gravy train is pointedly spelled in all lower case. undertone. A move that carries with it all kinds of potential associations. It diminishes the movie, for a start, giving it a literal ‘smallness’. Perhaps that of an underdog. It places it in a minor key, you might say. Unassuming. Or, perhaps, easy to underestimate. Something quiet waiting to grab you by the scruff of the neck. If it’s under-anything, unfortunately, it’s underwhelming. A patience-testing and unrewarding throwback to the cheap, spurious noise horrors of the late ’00s. It is no surprise whatsoever that it’s creator, Ian Tuason, is already connected to 2027’s proposed eighth Paranormal Activity film. That’s exactly the wheelhouse we’re dealing with here.

If that’s your thing, go eat it up. If not… This may be a tough 90ish minutes. 

We’re in the home of podcaster Evy Babic (Nina Kiri), caring for her dying mother (Michèle Duquet) who is predicted to pass any day now. Evy is co-host of The Undertone podcast; a weekly dissection of tales of the paranormal that she co-hosts remotely with Justin (Adam DiMarco). For some insane reason, Evy only seems to record between 2 and 3am, and only in short bursts of ten minutes a pop because she’s tired. The Undertone must be a nightmare in the edit.

Justin proposes that they focus this week’s episode around 10 mysterious audio recordings he’s been sent in what sounds for all the world like a phishing email. Curious, Evy takes the bait and they start building the episode around their ‘live’ reactions to these suspicious files. The files amount to recordings of a couple as they sleep, but are pocked with strange poundings and back-masked nursery rhyme snippets. Googling frantically, Evy and Justin go down rabbit-holes of myths and folklore, from the origins of ditties like “Baa Baa Black Sheep” to incredulous tales of orphans being buried alive to sanctify London Bridge. Like a lot of podcasts, it passes the time.

Problem is, Evy’s already dealing with both her mother’s end-of-life care and her building anxieties that she herself might be pregnant, cycles of motherhood that spiral into her growing connection to the ‘creepy’ audio files that she and Justin are excavating. What unfurls, gradually, is a fairly familiar and predictable downward spiral, eked out over days thanks to the wildly inconsistent manner in which these two record. 

Much has been made of the effective soundscape here, and credit where it’s due, it is immersive. We’re acutely aware of every pop and artefact in the recordings, while there are different timbres to the ambient sounds of Evy’s house vs. the zeroed-in focus of her noise-cancelling headphones. Later, as Evy’s perception of the ‘real’ becomes compromised, undertone is able to effectively make us paranoid. Was that sound in an audio recording, or was it somewhere in the house? It’s a skillful mix.

If only that same level of care and attention had been applied to the story being told, which is derivative in the extreme, and far less complex or intriguing than it seems to believe it is. Switched on viewers listeners will have figured where all this is headed by the end of File 3 or 4, which makes getting to the end of File 10 something of a laborious chore. And then there are the other accoutrements outside of the podcast records, from untrustworthy reflections to hackneyed crayon drawings, undertone rests most of its laurels on overused stock ideas that have lost all power or meaning. 

It takes an interminable amount of time to get there, but things do amp up come the bedlam of that final file, but not in a way that’s well orchestrated or contained. A late reveal is more likely to get eyes-rolling that closing in horror; a frankly irritating ploy that undermines much of what we’ve experienced and leaves undertone with nothing but a collage of dated Creepypasta ideas to rattle through for it’s jaundiced, cacophonous conclusion. 

The idea of sound as a conveyance for evil has been done plenty of times before (The Lords of Salem, Evil Dead Rise, The X-Files, Millennium…) and frequently with more creativity than is evidenced here. Tuason rests most of the movie on it’s ability to drum-up unease with the audio. Visually it’s a terribly uninteresting film. Every self-conscious tilt of the camera has one bracing for the same motif of a world turned upside down found in Midsommar, Smile or the Candyman reboot. The dearth of the new is persistently felt. Kiri is fine and her interplay with DiMarco at least allows us some warmth, but the main take-away here is that this would probably have been more effective as a podcast. And this is almost certainly going to lose any power it has once it leaves the cinemas for people’s homes and devices. undertone may have already passed it’s expiry date.