Somewhere inside your head, the horror sings in you.
Undertone Review
A podcast host covering spooky content moves in to care for her dying mother. When sent recordings of a pregnant couple’s paranormal encounters, she discovers their story parallels hers, each tape pushing her toward madness.
One day, I’ll play you sounds that can’t be made. They’ll sing in you from somewhere inside your head. You’ll hear it happen inside you. Like phantoms half-imagined. This is the promise at the heart of Ian Tuason’s Undertone, an A24 horror feature that arrives with serious genre credentials and a singular focus on what we hear when we close our eyes.
The film sold to A24 after its Fantasia premiere, scored a Sundance slot, and landed writer-director Ian Tuason the next instalment of Paranormal Activity. That trajectory signals something interesting in contemporary horror. The movie itself unfolds as a one-location, almost one-hander starring Nina Kiri as Evy, a podcast host recording her paranormal show in her dying mother’s house. She waits for the death rattle amid Catholic iconography and unresolved guilt. Silent and high.
The setup promises intimate terror. Kiri carries the film alone, reacting to voices only we hear and threats only she senses. Tuason’s camera work evokes security footage and ghost POVs, reinforcing a voyeuristic sense of dread. The sound design is immersive, oppressive, and central to the experience. Ten audio files arrive anonymously. A supernatural presence responds. Evy’s isolation deepens.
What follows is a study in sounds that can’t be made, auditory hallucinations that blur the line between external threat and internal collapse. The film asks whether horror lives in the outside world or somewhere inside your head. The answer, like the best scares, is both.
Undertone Review: Sounds That Can’t Be Made, Horror That Can’t Be Shaken
A Horror Movie Review by Hope Madden
Ian Tuason’s paranormal podcast feature Undertone offers a lot of reasons to be impressed. It’s a single location shoot, and almost a one-hander. Aside from a catatonic mother (Michéle Duquet) and a variety of voices, Nina Kiri is on her own.
Kiri plays Evy, who is recording her paranormal podcast Undertone from her dying mother’s house. Evy’s been staying at Mom’s for a while now, and if she’s honest about it, she’d like it to just be over with. Evy’s waiting for the death rattle.
She loves Mama, but the relationship is thorny with Catholic guilt and shame. We sense this more than see it as Tuason crowds his set design with Catholic iconography. It’s a busy if impressive set, and Tuason makes great use of it with fascinating camera work. He uses mainly stationary cameras, often set off-angle so they feel more like a voyeur’s or ghost’s point of view, or even a security camera. The movement reinforces that sense. On the rare occasion that the camera does move, it does so in an obviously mechanical way that even more closely resembles security footage.
This gives the film a Paranormal Activity vibe—fitting, as Tuason is slated to write and direct the next installment in the found footage franchise.
But Undertone is less about what you see and more about what you hear. The somewhat oppressive sound design is intentional, of course, and frequently effective.
Kiri delivers a heroic performance. Not only has she no conscious actor to react to, but the vast majority of her performance is simply Evy, in headphones, listening to something.
The film falls apart at the story level. Evy and her podcast co-host Justin (voiced by Adam DiMarco) decide to listen to a set of 10 audio files emailed to them anonymously. The files conjure up something supernatural that, combined with Evy’s isolated, spooky, guilt-laden environment, starts affecting her headspace.
But the sound files and podcast are silly. The mythology within the house—Evy’s relationship with Catholicism and her mother, the demonic yarn being revealed by the audio files—none of it comes together into a coherent horror story. And worst of all, nothing happens.
Undertone is an impressive technical achievement, but the story’s just not there
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