“Undertone” has the sound of horror, but lacks story!
Big promises come with a horror movie that claims it will scare you through sound alone. You’re expecting fear projected by your imagination. It’s a creative gamble that produced movies like The Blair Witch Project, where what you couldn’t see was the entire point. A lot of folks may not care for The Blair Witch Project, but I really enjoyed it. When writer-director Ian Tuason introduces Undertone as “the scariest movie you’ll ever hear,” I expected something bold.
Instead, this movie sounds frightening, but not original. The setup is promising. Evy, played by Nina Kiri, is a paranormal podcaster who has moved back into her childhood home to care for her dying mother. Her life is unraveling. She’s drinking again. Her relationship is crumbling. The only thing holding her together is a late-night podcast she records with her friend Justin, played by Adam DiMarco.
Their show thrives on skepticism versus belief. Evy plays the rational voice; Justin wants every ghost story to be real. Their latest case arrives as ten mysterious audio recordings from an anonymous listener. The tapes begin innocently enough, but as the nights pass, the recordings reveal something stranger. Nursery rhymes muttered in the dark, and a suggestion of an ancient demon that preys on mothers and unborn children. It’s a terrific hook … for about twenty minutes. The rest of the time the movie just drags on.
Then the movie settles into a strange rhythm where almost nothing actually happens. Evy listens to a tape. Evy Googles something. Evy stares down a dark hallway in her house while the lights flicker ominously. Repeat.
Coupled with the slow pace, the artsy camera angles and framing caused me to constantly watch all the negative space in the film waiting for something to move in the dark. Nope. Just empty space. I was waiting for something to happen, and got let down several times.
Look, some great films thrive on patience, but slow horror requires a sense that something is building beneath the surface. In Undertone, it often feels like the movie is simply treading water. Much of Evy’s investigation amounts to late-night Wikipedia research about folklore and demonic mythology. At one point I realized we are probably only a few years away from a horror film where the protagonist just asks AI to explain the monster. The film clearly wants Evy’s personal life to mirror the horror unfolding in the recordings. Her mother is dying upstairs. Her boyfriend is unreliable. She may be pregnant. These are heavy themes, but gestures are all they ever become.
I admit the one place where Undertone undeniably works is its sound design. Tuason clearly understands how audio can manipulate an audience. Every creak of the house, every distant footstep, every distorted whisper is pushed into the foreground. When Evy slips on her noise-canceling headphones, the entire world drops into silence in a way that’s genuinely eerie.
You would think the movie will do something clever with that idea … It doesn’t. Instead the film falls back on horror’s most reliable bag of tricks. Creepy kid voices and jump scares. These moments work in the most basic sense. Loud noises will always make people flinch. But flinching isn’t the same thing as fear.
And then there’s the ending, if you can call it that.
After carefully rationing out its ten audio files over the course of the film, the movie reaches its climax and abruptly cuts to black in a storm of chaotic noise. No real explanation. No emotional resolution. Just a collection of unsettling sounds and the vague suggestion that something terrible has happened. All that buildup and we don’t know what really happened.
Ambiguous endings can be haunting when they feel intentional. Here it feels less like a creative choice and more like the film simply ran out of ideas. At best it’s 5 of 10.
