Undertone review: Audio terror hits home

The bump in the night is a horror staple for a reason. There’s something uniquely unsettling about a sound you can’t explain. Undertone, the latest horror movie from A24, delves into the eerie earworms that might echo through nightmares. 

Written and directed by Ian Tuason, Undertone centers on an isolated podcaster named Evy (Nina Kiri), who becomes fixated on a series of mysterious audio clips. As she goes down the metaphorical rabbit’s hole on what they could mean, the world around her seems to shift, forcing her to face a horrid reality.

Undertone is a slow-burning, spooky thriller. 

Tuason makes an impressive feature directorial debut with Undertone, as this film exudes a quiet confidence that rejects standard scare tropes. Forget a cold open that looks to titillate with terror out of the gate, and don’t expect cheap jump scares. Tuason’s version of horror is more akin to slow suffocation than to quick, brutal stabs. 

We’ll meet Evy in her mother’s house, which is decorated in feminine but festering flourishes that reflect the woman’s waning health even when she’s offscreen. Evy is surrounded by her mother’s things and the looming certainty of her mother’s impending death. Tuason offers us no escape from Evy’s cage, as all of Undertone is set in this one house, and most of it in one room. While characters exist beyond Evy and her mother, they will be the only people we see for the whole of the film, heightening the sense of Evy’s isolation. 

The only friend Evy seems to have is her podcast partner Justin (Adam DiMarco, who is never shown onscreen), who lives in the UK, meaning that the best time for them to record is 3 a.m. for Evy. In the still of the night, she hunches over the dining room table that’s she’s transformed into a podcasting setup, complete with noise-cancelling headphones, a prominent microphone, her notes, and a glowing laptop. Visually, Evy’s modern, cold electronics clash with her mother’s floral wallpaper and the requisite Last Supper print hanging behind her. But stronger clashes will come in the audio as Undertone spins its slippery story. 

Undertone leans hard into audio terror. 

Justin and Evy’s podcast dedicatedly explores creepy stories, with him playing the eager believer to her scathing skeptic. So, when he pulls up 10 audio clips from a mysterious source, she’s already rolling her eyes. However, the story teased within them soon hooks her interest. A young heterosexual couple is recording their slumber, because the woman is talking in her sleep. What begins as an amusement for the pair turns perilous as it seems something sinister begins speaking through her in the night. 

While Justin is giddy over the progression of the tapes, Evy is uncharacteristically shaken. They’ll need to pick up the next recording on another night. And in between, Evy has only the fading breath of her mother and her own footsteps for company, right? Not quite. Something seems to have entered her home through those tapes. Snatches of creepy children’s songs, weird crayon scribblings, and a strange figure become Evy’s new — and unwelcome companions. The elements themselves have been used plenty in horror. But Tuason makes the most out of them with a masterful soundscape that swells, throbs, and chitters in the theater, rattling the ears — and very bones — of the audience, just as they do Evy’s. 

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In all these aspects, I admire Tuason’s technical approach to building terror, even if they didn’t do much to scare me. The audio meant to be chilling often had me chilling. Not that scratchy records of children singing “Baa Baa Black Sheep” will make my meditation playlist anytime soon, but the should-be creepy sound effects had me drifting toward sleep, even as I was engaged in the mystery of the tapes. Then that mystery takes a subgenre twist that left me disappointed. To Tuason’s credit, he earnestly builds lore that competently aligns to Evy’s personal struggles, as if these tapes have found her — and not vice versa. However, after being enthralled by the film’s first and second acts, I found my mind wandering in the third. By that point, the strong soundscape concept is overtaken by horror clichés, leading to an ending that is disturbing but also underwhelming. For me, the film’s slow burn approach, and my patience for it, didn’t pay off.

In the end, I was more impressed by Undertone’s concept that I was entertained by its execution. I am intrigued to see what Tuason does next. But this one — I’m not on its wavelength.

Undertone opens in theaters on March 13.

​Mashable