Undertone is in theaters on March 13.
Sound is a criminally under-respected aspect of film production, and there’s a school of thought that most audiences are more likely to be taken out of the experience of watching a movie by bad sound than bad picture. With its “haunted podcast” hook, Undertone has no shortage of respect for the aural arts and does emphasize them consistently, using sound to ratchet up the intensity and sustain a threatening mood. But with little in the way of interesting visual ideas or compelling drama to support that mood, Undertone is far more muted than its interesting central conceit provides for.
Undertone follows podcaster Evy (Nina Kiri), who’s largely homebound taking care of her comatose, dying Mama (Michelle Duquet). The auditory experience of Undertone has been billed as critical to the film, and director Ian Tuason gets Undertone off to a good start by quickly establishing Evy’s difficult circumstances in a montage that establishes not just the look of the house they share, but the sound. Tuason captures the stillness of the home, Mama’s labored breathing, hints at the happier life Evy and her Mama shared before she fell ill; they’re all reminders of how sidelined Evy has become in her own life.
That all slides away when Evy sits at her table and puts her headphones on to record The Undertone Podcast, a show in which she skeptically debates her believer co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco) about paranormal phenomena and conspiracy theories. Undertone’s sound mix focuses on Evy and Justin’s voices at the expense of all other background noise during their recording sessions. It’s a great technical hook for the movie that succeeds at not just demonstrating how the podcast is Evy’s escape from her dire circumstances, but providing a clean sensory stage for the auditory horror. As a device for driving dread in horror, restricting a character’s senses and channeling that into the filmmaking is a savvy move to create a base level of tension, and it’s a stylistic choice that does help Undertone maintain momentum, even through a mystery that winds up feeling like a broken record.
Evy and Justin receive an anonymous email containing 10 audio recordings from an unknown sender which document the plight of Jessa and Mike, an expectant young couple who seem to have been plagued by a supernatural entity as they prepare to welcome their baby. From there, Undertone falls into a predictable rhythm: Evy and Justin listen to more of the recordings which reveal more of the Jessa and Mike thread, something causes the two to stop the podcast taping, and Evy experiences something spooky in the time before the next session, suggesting that maybe whatever’s happening on the tapes is starting up in her own home.
Opening email attachments from unknown senders is, of course, the “reading Sumerian out of a book bound in human flesh” of 21st century horror, and that’s emblematic of where Undertone fails to consistently deliver on its premise: it’s quite old-fashioned. Secret messages in lullabies played in reverse, creepy crying babies, passages that trigger events around the person listening, elements of speech hidden in the spectrogram of the files, long stretches of silence punctuated by spikes in volume for an easy jump scare… these are tricks we’ve specifically seen/heard before in audio-forward horror like Session 9 or Pontypool and, really, across countless other horror movies too. There’s nothing inherently wrong with reaching into a well-worn trick bag to put your own spin on the classics, but Undertone’s horror seldom takes advantage of the modern trappings of podcasting to any specific degree. The recording of the Undertone Podcast episode in question winds up just functioning as a structural home base for the plot, which feels like a missed opportunity for Undertone to create more of a unique identity for itself.
Undertone’s nondescript visual sensibility further hampers those identity issues. Tuason favors languid takes with the camera drifting around the naturalistically-lit recording space, creating a sense that something terrifying is lurking just out of view. Undertone’s narrative rhythm seldom allows for that dread to pay off during the sessions though, as it’s usually after those that Evy sees hints that the entity from the tapes may be encroaching on her. So, as the movie goes, the recording sessions actually start to feel like a safer space for Evy. As for when she’s checking to see what’s going bump in the night, Evy plays out a familiar pattern of slowly walking to the source of the noise, and either finding nothing or, at most, there may be something creepy that activates in soft focus just out of her field of view. Undertone’s visual and aural approaches to horror seldom feel like they’re working in concert, and neither is consistently effective enough to make up for the shortcomings of the other. The mix of the movie’s unsettling tone and the mystery of just what’s causing the chaos on the tapes (and how that chaos is bleeding into Evy’s life) are each compelling enough to keep Undertone afloat as it goes, but don’t expect it to echo with you too long after its 94 minutes are up.
As Evy, Nina Kiri’s got a hell of a job in selling the horror of what’s on those tapes all by herself onscreen. Dramatizing the act of active listening is a tall order, but Kiri does well with matching the pitch of Evy’s reactions to what’s going on in the recordings without ever selling anything too hard. That composure carries into moments where she’s struggling with her relationship to alcohol or investigating the increasingly strange occurrences around her house, like the appearances of strange tokens or her mom somehow appearing out of bed, despite being effectively brain dead. But in the moments where Evy speaks to her unresponsive “Mama”, Kiri adopts a childlike tone that feels incongruous to the more assertive Evy we see during the podcast tapings, even if she’s not “in character” in front of the mic. The choice to infantilize Evy in that way, especially as she considers having a child of her own, feels aimed at propping up Undertone’s motherhood theme which, with Mama’s failing health and Jessa’s harrowing circumstances at front of mind, seems like it should be a far more prominent part of Undertone’s full picture than it winds up being.
Evy’s at a fascinating point in her life, debating whether to go right from being a full-time caregiver to her mom to a full-time caregiver to a child of her own, so it’s increasingly aggravating for that idea to get more and more backgrounded to the surface-level supernatural spookies that are pulling her mind in different directions. Not helping any of this is Justin, Evy’s grating London-based co-host. As the true believer, Justin’s the one more concerned with the theater of the podcast, but even when he’s not amping up the showmanship when “in character,” DiMarco is less successful than Kiri at matching his emotional tenor to what’s going on in Evy’s house. Most of Justin’s dialogue is nakedly designed to keep the plot moving or to prompt Evy to reveal a little more about how she’s feeling, but as the only other real character in the movie, especially because he’s off-camera the whole time, Justin could’ve used a lot more fleshing out for as much airtime as his voice gets.
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