Review: Undertone — Crooked Marquee

As a horror movie about a podcaster potentially plagued by something sinister and (mostly) unseen, Undertone relies on the power sound more than your average film, even beyond its brethren in the horror genre. Yet it evokes more than the standard shocked gasps and nervous laughter from the audience—though there are plenty of those. The wildest reaction it earned in my screening was a sigh of audible pleasure, from multiple viewers, when podcast host Evy (Nina Kiri) puts on her headphones for recording, and what she and we hear is the sharp switch to a blissful nothing. There’s no ticking of a clock, low hum of a refrigerator, or the other domestic noises that we take for granted. Just … nothing. It happens in the first few scenes of the film, and it’s the last moment of peace in this unsettling film that left me absolutely rattled for most of its 90-ish minutes, mostly as a result of its masterful use of audio.

Isolation is a key element of many horror films, whether geographical or psychological, but there are few experiences as isolating in both respects as being a full-time caregiver, especially one whose only employment is as a podcaster. In her role taking care of her dying mother (Michèle Duquet), Evy rarely leaves her childhood home. Instead, she is surrounded by religious art and outdated furnishings, and her only respite from nursing her mother is her 3 a.m. recording sessions with her cohost, Justin (voiced by an unseen Adam DiMarco), for their show about paranormal happenings. She’s the skeptic, the Scully to Justin’s Mulder, quick to explain away the mysterious stories they cover for each episode with logic and rationality. Yet their latest episode finds Justin playing a set of 10 haunting recordings he received via an anonymous email, and Evy begins to see eerie parallels with her current experience.

In the grand tradition of indies like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, writer-director Ian Tuason’s feature debut accomplishes ample scares with very little budget. Reportedly produced for only $500,000, Undertone makes great use of its spare elements, with its setting in a single location and casting of just a few actors. Evy and her Mama are the only characters who are seen, with the rest of the small cast only heard. It’s all terrifyingly effective while showing very little; its worst damage is done through the audience’s imagining of the violence it only describes, or what might happen to Evy as she and Justin continue to progress through the 10 audio files.

Undertone freaked me out and fucked me up as only a supernatural horror film can affect someone who has turned her back on her evangelical upbringing. Who’s to say if Tuason’s movie would have messed me up quite so badly if I hadn’t grown up believing in spiritual warfare and spending every family roadtrip listening to the audiobook of This Present Darkness, a Stephen King knockoff about demons taking over a small town? But the horror of Undertone is far more universal, especially in its depiction of a daughter who worries about whether she could be taking better care of her ailing parent or if she’d spent enough time with her mother when she wasn’t on death’s door. Whether or not you believe in demons (or only used to), there’s still something frightening happening to Evy.

Though the chilling sound design is its best feature, Undertone finds other ways to keep the audience in a constant state of unease. Tuason and director of photography Graham Beasley frame scenes so that we’re constantly looking for something scary to enter the frame. These guys also love a Dutch tilt (I mean, same), turning what appears to be a very standard home built in the 20th century into a house of horrors.

Overall, Undertone achieves an ideal balance: a lot of fun while also incredibly disturbing, aka my favorite kind of good bad time. I spent most of its running time with actual chills, drawing my knees into my chest and using our progression through the 10 emailed recordings to estimate roughly how much more time I’d be panicking for. I appreciate being given such a nice round number, so that I could easily calculate the percentage of the movie left, since I lacked higher brain function and could only think about how scared I was.