2026 | rated R | starring Nina Kiri | written and directed by Ian Tauson | 1 hr 34 mins | 3 1/2 out of 5 |
Evy (Nina Kiri, The Handmaid’s Tale) is a podcaster who lives alone with her comatose mother. She records her show, The Undertone Podcast, in the middle of the night with her co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco, Something Very Bad is Going to Happen) over the phone where the two explore supernatural phenomenon in which he takes the role of the investigator and her the skeptic. This week, they explore a series of voice recordings sent to them by a man who started recording his wife talking in her sleep. As the situation in the recording gets more and more bizarre, Evy and Justin’s research into the supernatural yields frightening results.
This is not my kind of movie. That’s the high compliment that I can give Undertone, this isn’t my type of movie, and I was still completely absorbed by it. Writer/director Ian Tauson’s feature debut is a grandchild of The Blair Witch Project and Paranoid Activity, a lineage of films that started with the premise that what you don’t see is the scariest part and milked that until we got a series of films where nothing happened, and you didn’t see anything at all until the final seconds. Undertone does almost exactly that beat-by-beat. And yet, it worked for me. It’s methodical, atmospheric and chilling when the time comes to unveil what’s going on here. It is a small, single-location film with one speaking part on screen. The only other actor on screen is in a coma, and the other speaking part is over the phone.
First, it goes about detailing Evy’s process with her podcast. An element that feels a little fake because this brand of podcasting feels a little fake. Evy and Justin frequently refer to getting in and out of character as they record. Then we go about the business of researching, playing back audio, website searches, taking notes and sketching. As the title suggests, Undertone is entirely driven by audio. Was that spike in the audio a voice? Is that swooshing sound in the audio saying “kill”? Is the wife in the recordings talking in her sleep possessed by a demon? Not only is most of the horror conveyed through audio but most of the storytelling is too. We learn of Evy and Justin from what they say on and off air to each other without any artificial exposition dumps.
Undertone is an effective, skillfully crafted slow burn that actually burns. It injects creativity into a traditionally uncreative genre. When it blows open in the final minutes it is chilling, but it’s also an appropriate payoff to what has been setup. Where a Paranormal Activity give us nothing under the guise of voyeurism and the possibility of seeing something happen subtly in the grainy night footage, this movie unfolds, step-by-step giving us stuff to chew on. This time it’s the journey, not the destination that’s what works. When the finale comes it’s not random, it is the appropriate payoff to the set up. When it hits it feels earned.