Undertone is a horror film, set entirely within a single house, in which only two characters are seen on screen. It leans heavily on two things repeatedly done by the horror genre—Catholic iconography and children singing children’s songs, creepily—and the film has more ideas and themes than time, including a will-she-or-won’t-she abortion subplot. At the end, it throws all of its elements together in the end with little sense of clarity or conclusion. Also, it’s based around the production of a podcast. Like Roger Ebert said about hot-air balloons, good movies rarely feature a podcast.
But the film does something exceptionally well: It has the best sound design of any movie I’ve seen this year. I saw it in the Dolby room at an AMC theater, and would recommend either watching it there or somewhere else with a top-tier sound system.
Undertone is the debut of Canadian writer-director Ian Tuason, who has a flair for the creepy; the director reportedly shot the film in his own parents’ house, and between the figurines and paintings of Jesus, it has the lived-in appearance of the home of an older Catholic person.
Serbian actress Nina Kiri, best known for some of the later Handmaid’s Tale seasons, more than holds the screen as the only major on-screen character. Kiri stars as Evy, a woman who lives in a house with her dying mother (Michèle Duquet), who we can tell from the decor of her home is a devout Catholic, a faith that her daughter doesn’t share. Evy has complicated feelings about caring for her mother—seemingly without a hospice nurse or other help—and about where they’re leaving things with their relationship.
Evy also co-hosts a popular horror podcast with her friend Justin (voiced by Adam DiMarco). The podcast’s gimmick is that she’s the skeptic and he’s the believer, which makes sense, although little else about the podcast does: It’s always recorded at three in the morning, what they talk about doesn’t seem to be planned, and unlike most podcasts, it occasionally has a live, call-in episode. And like in nearly all movies in which a skeptic squares off against a believer or a conspiracy theorist, the unfolding of the plot proves the skeptic wrong and the conspiracist right.
The intriguing premise kicks off when the two podcast cohosts receive an anonymous email with 10 audio files attached. They listen to the files in order, which depict a couple recording each other while they sleep, featuring talking, sleepwalking, and eventually much worse.
This, along with the stress of her mother’s decline, causes Evy to become unmoored. There’s also some mythology involving evil spirits, which the film only seems half-heartedly interested in. Undertone can’t juggle all of these disparate ideas.