REVIEW: undertone

By George & Josh Bate

Sound design is often overlooked as a crucial element of horror cinema. For as frightening as the hulking Leatherface’s mask made of human skin is, the roaring sound of his chainsaw, created by blending in the roar of a lion, heightens the scares of 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Something similar can be said for John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place two-parter, films that make the absence of sound and the distinct emergence of every small noise critical to its plot. Or Ridley Scott’s Alien, which doesn’t just evoke terror through the Xenomorph or the horrifying chest-burster scene but also through the echoing and industrial noises of the USCSS Nostromo. The new A24 horror movie undertone continues the tradition of sonically unsettling horror movies and delivers a viewing experience that will rattle the hell out of you.

From writer-director Ian Tuason, making his feature film debut, undertone follows Evy (Nina Kiri), the host of a popular paranormal podcaster and caregiver for her terminally ill mother. As the podcast’s resident skeptic, Evy is used to trading friendly blows remotely with her co-host and true believer Justin (Adam DiMarco). But when the duo receive an anonymous email and begin to analyze the ten disturbing audio files it contains, Evy struggles to make sense of increasingly disturbing occurrences.

Few horror movies this century unnerve to the degree that undertone does. Filmmaker Ian Tuason, who began his career making VR-inspired horror shorts on YouTube, deliberately employs slow, sometimes tediously so, pacing to gradually build tension in the most calculated of manners. The film avoids throwing big scares at the audiences from the get-go and does something rather unique with its structuring of frights. Just as the tension seems like it’s going to continue to rise, Tuason abruptly pulls the plug and gives the viewer reprieve from suspense at the exact moment most horror movies would choose to escalate. The result is a film that steadily burrows itself under your skin until you realize (likely around the halfway mark) just how much it is rattling your nervous system. 

Tuason’s calculated and unconventional pacing of tension is made all the more effective by an incredible use of confined space and a limited cast. The entirety of undertone takes place within a few rooms in Evy’s childhood home, which also just so happens to be the home Tuason grew up in in Toronto. The outside world is never shown, nor are the faces of any speaking characters besides Evy. This gives the film an uncomfortably intimate, micro-horror atmosphere that makes the tapes Evy listens to all the more harrowing. There’s also a dream-like quality to the film’s setting, with Evy’s mother comatosed (or maybe not…?) in a hazy upstairs bedroom, while Evy herself records her podcast in an eerily quiet dining room at 2am. It’s simply remarkable what Tuason is able to achieve with such a limited environment and collective of characters to draw upon.

For as much has been made about undertone’s creative use of sound design to evoke terror, the film equally impresses with its visuals. Some of the film’s most effective chills come as Tuason opts for long takes as the camera slowly pans across a room. It seems as if the filmmaker is drawing our attention to something sinister lurking in the background or just around the corner, but we can never quite make out what it is that’s meant to scare us. These sequences, which occur throughout the film, evoke palpable tension, even when the vast majority of them don’t converge on anything close to a big, overt scare.

Tuason’s impressive use of camera movement continues as the filmmaker directs the movie in such a way that one never knows what the camera is going to do next. Out of nowhere, some scenes begin with the camera oriented at an odd angle. Others unfold with an overwhelming focus on empty space as our protagonist occupies just a corner of the frame. It’s a unique, yet surprisingly never showy style of helming a horror movie. Every shot, camera angle, and movement feels meticulously planned and serves a distinct purpose in delivering a supremely unsettling viewing experience.

Evident to anyone even remotely familiar, however, is that undertone’s most salient point of uniqueness is its creative use of sound design. Every time Evy sits at the dinner table and gets ready to record a podcast, she puts on noise-cancelling headphones, which immediately deafen the room’s ticking clock and, in turn, convey to the viewer that what we’re about to hear is entirely from Evy or the headphones. In this sense, the film finds an interesting auditory point of entry to mark transitions from Evy’s regular living to the podcast. Tuason creatively toys with this idea throughout though in giving the sounds of the podcast, in particular the ten disturbing audio files, a sense of direction. In doing so, Evy (and the audience) begins to question whether the sounds she’s hearing are from the recordings or from her immediate surroundings. 

The audio files Evy and her podcasting partner listen to serve as the driving force of both the story and scares. As mentioned, it takes quite some time for the content of these files to evoke genuine fear, but, eventually, that fear arrives in spades. After working their way through hidden messages in old children’s songs and digitally reversing strange background noises, the film builds tomorrow a truly gripping and terrifying finale. Both auditorily and visually, this finale finds Tuason firing on all cylinders as the filmmaker constructs an intense, bombastic, disturbing, and visceral conclusion to his movie. Such is the effectiveness of this finale that one of us genuinely had trouble sleeping the night after watching the movie, an extraordinarily rare occurrence for either of us.

Where undertone falters most greatly, unfortunately, is in the lore and themes of its story. While watching (and listening to) Evy and Justin disentangle the secrets of the audio files is certainly interesting and poses an intriguing mystery to ponder over, the ultimate explanation for what is happening (both literally and metaphorically) is a tad unfocused.

undertone juggles a number of ideas that connect our protagonist to the audio files she’s listening to. Evy takes care of her dying mother, who is deeply religious and adorns her house with all kinds of Christian imagery. Evy expresses a distaste for religion, going so far as to shove a small religious statue in a drawer to keep it out of view. She also has an uncaring boyfriend who disregards the gravity of her situation. Things become more complicated when we learn that Evy is pregnant with her boyfriend’s child, a disturbing parallel to the audio files’ depiction of a couple expecting a child. Eventually, Tuason tries to tie all of these disparate elements together into a cohesive film about faith, the blurry lines between life and death, demonic possession, and fertility. Unfortunately, his attempts yield mixed results – narratively, the film leaves too many gaps and features lore that bridges on convoluted, while thematically it seems more interesting in throwing ideas into the mix rather than exploring them in a profound way.

VERDICT: 7/10

The new A24 horror movie undertone is destined to rattle the hell out of you. The feature directorial debut from filmmaker Ian Tuason initially unfolds with slow, even tedious, pacing before it becomes evident just how deeply, and subtly, it has burrowed itself under your skin. For much as the film’s inventive sound design has earned plaudits, Tuason’s directing is the unsung hero here as the filmmaker makes impressive use of slow camera movements to maximize suspense. The sound design is similarly effective at evoking unease, especially in an intense and visceral conclusion that ranks among the scariest horror movie endings in recent memory. Where undertone falters is in its story’s lore and themes, both of which prove convoluted and underdeveloped. Narratively and thematically, Tuason’s film required some refinement in order to make it a truly great horror movie of the 21st century. But experientially, undertone is a sensory nightmare that will keep you up at night.