‘Undertone’ Review: A24 Horror Film Makes a Podcast Seem Profoundly Chilling

Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: A horror film built around a podcast sounds as if it could be a terrifyingly insufferable idea. 

Sorry not sorry to those who enjoy or make podcasts, but there are simply too many that are annoying, derivative and generally unimaginative. Plus, the only thing truly scary about most of them is that they may help destroy the foundations of democracy and send already plummeting literacy rates off a cliff. On top of that, making a film about them could easily descend into being about throwing out cheap, inside-baseball references to the medium without investing in the mechanics of how to make a work of effective horror cinema.

Thankfully, writer-director Ian Tuason’s terrific “Undertone” puts any and all doubts to rest with a consistently creepy knockout of a feature debut. The film centers on a paranormal skeptic and a believer who do a podcast where they listen together to supposedly haunted recordings. Though isolated from each other and only communicating on the line, they find that something else might be there with both of them.

The skeptic, Evy (Nina Kiri), is also caring for her dying mother upstairs in the house; she relies on talking about the paranormal with her co-host, Justin (Adam DiMarco), who is elsewhere, as a distraction from the impending loss she faces. The podcasts aren’t enough to push away the feelings entirely, though they keep her mind occupied with something that seems inconsequential and silly. But when the duo are sent 10 increasingly eerie recordings from a mysterious email address, she finds that even when the recordings end, the sounds not only continue to ring in her ears and rattle her sanity, but may take her very soul.

Skepticism gives way to unadulterated dread as the film taps into something that feels as if it may have been conjured up from some invisible, truly terrifying place beyond our understanding. Shots are defined by an unsettling amount of negative space or by blood-curdling sounds that cut through the eerie quiet, casting a soul-rattling spell that you, like Evy, may struggle to break free from once it has you in its grasp. 

Any more details about what unfolds would rob this patient yet petrifying experience of its impact. Immersive even as it intentionally withholds its narrative, this is a formally ambitious little film defined by some of the most spine-chilling sound design you’ll ever hear. It’s a spooky ride bolstered by craft that proves, once more, that less can often be more in horror.

Tuason, who is currently set to direct a new entry in the resurrected “Paranormal Activity” horror series, effectively grounds the action in some of the personal anxieties that Evy has about her relationship to her mother. He doesn’t make the film about trauma, as many modern horror films do in an often superficial way, but Evy is clearly carrying a lot of baggage. That she throws herself into the podcast in the hopes that she won’t have to think about her personal anxiety, only to discover even greater nightmares, makes the film all the more terrifying, and often quite tragic.

Evy takes on a persona of sorts in the podcast, but as her real fears make that harder to do, Tuason plunges her and the audience into the pits of an auditory hell, culminating in a conclusion that brings everything to the surface in wonderfully sinister fashion.

It’s an entertaining film that pulls out all the stops in the finale, but also proves more subtly, eerily evocative, with one shattering shot near the very end where time itself comes undone. Most podcasts remain disposable, yet this film about a truly cursed one captures not just the evil that may lurk within them, but wields a sonic power that, for the brave, is one you’ll want to listen back to. Just beware what you may be inviting in by doing so. 

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