Review: undertone

Undertone, the microbudget Canadian chiller that rode Fantasia buzz all the way to an A24 release and a Sundance Midnight berth, wants to do for podcasts what Paranormal Activity did for found footage. It plants its camera in a single house, hands its protagonist a laptop and a pair of headphones, and asks a simple question: what if the scariest thing in the room is something you can only hear?

Evy (Nina Kiri) is the skeptic half of an occult-themed podcast she co-hosts with unseen believer Justin (Adam DiMarco, heard but never glimpsed). When the two receive a series of ten audio files from a listener, recordings of a woman murmuring strange phrases in her sleep made by her partner, they decide to build a season around decoding them. What begins as backward nursery rhymes and garbled static slowly curdles into something more sinister, with references to sacrifice, demons, and ancient evil lurking between the syllables of “Rock-a-bye Baby.”

The hook is undeniably strong. Watching Evy scrub through waveforms, slow down static, and isolate whispered consonants shouldn’t be cinematic. And yet, for long stretches, it is. Director Ian Tuason and his sound team craft an unnerving aural landscape that turns negative space into a weapon. The house hums. The air seems to vibrate. The recordings themselves, fragmented, reversed, layered; create a queasy sense that something is trying to claw its way out of the speakers. The film isn’t exactly scary, but it is deeply unsettling. It gets under your skin the way a half-remembered nightmare does.

Formally, it’s impressive. Practically speaking, it’s a film that almost anyone could have assembled: one primary location, one on-screen actor for most of the runtime, and a narrative engine powered by audio files. As an example of indie horror ingenuity, undertone deserves to be studied. You can feel the ingenuity in every frame.

But ingenuity only takes you so far.

The film’s structure proves to be its biggest liability. The ten recordings are parsed out over days, with Evy repeatedly pausing production to tend to her terminally ill mother (Michèle Duquet), who lies bedridden in the next room. Each interruption resets the tension. Just as the film begins to build momentum, we cut to another morning, another cup of coffee, another round of digital sleuthing. Instead of escalating dread, the movie often feels like it’s starting over.

There’s also a muddled mythology at its core. For much of its runtime, undertone seems content to build its own cryptic lore through corrupted lullabies and whispered codes. But as events intensify, the film overlays more explicit Catholic imagery and religious backstory tied to Evy’s upbringing. Crucifixes appear. Old beliefs resurface. The shift from ambiguous, internet-age horror to something more doctrinal feels less like revelation and more like a late rewrite, blurring the thematic focus just when clarity is most needed.

And then there’s the ending.

Tuason spends much of the film training us to scan the edges of the frame, to anticipate some awful figure materializing in the negative space behind Evy. The sound design swells, the atmosphere tightens, and it feels as though we’re heading toward a visual crescendo that will justify 80 minutes of slow-burn restraint. Instead, the climax arrives abruptly and dissipates just as quickly, cutting to black with the same suddenness as one of the cursed audio files. At my screening, an audience member audibly gasped, “What?” as the credits rolled. It wasn’t admiration.

More troubling, however, is the film’s subtext. Evy discovers early on that she’s pregnant and expresses a desire to terminate the pregnancy, doubting her fitness as a mother while already overwhelmed caring for her own. Not long after, the supernatural elements escalate, centered around a demonic force associated with feeding on children. The timing, and the narrative framing, create an uneasy implication that her choice has invited or unleashed something monstrous. Whether intentional or not, the film flirts with the suggestion that she is being judged or punished for wanting autonomy over her body. It’s an undercurrent that lingers long after the credits, and not in a good way.

There’s talent here. There’s craft. Undertone is a testament to how far a clever concept and sharp sound design can go on a shoestring budget. But as a piece of storytelling, it feels both overhyped and undercooked, more compelling as a case study in indie horror economics than as a fully realized nightmare.

You may admire it. You may even find it spooky. But when the headphones come off, what remains is less a scream than a question mark.

3/5