It can always be argued that the theatrical experience is better for a horror movie than watching it at home, but that holds especially true for undertone. Unless you have a fully directional sound system in your TV room, this movie is a must in the cinema, where the eerie audio that’s central to its scare tactics can come at you from all sides and behind. It’s an aurally immersive slow burn that builds to a seriously freaky and frightening crescendo.
Although undertone isn’t found-footage, it has similar qualities to the best of those movies, allowing you to share the sensory experiences of its protagonist. Evy Babic (Nina Kira) is caregiving in the home of her dying mother (Michèle Duquet), having left the apartment she shared with her insensitive boyfriend Darren (Ryan Turner). She prefers the long-distance company of Justin Manuel (Adam DiMarco), her co-host on a strange-phenomena podcast called The Undertone. Tuason gets us into Evy’s headspace early on; when she puts on headphones for the podcast, all ambient sound cuts out, and what she hears becomes as important to us as it is to her.
Evy and Justin have an intriguing subject for their latest episode: A collection of 10 anonymously sent audio files. They prove to be recordings that a young man named Mike (Jeff Yung) has made, initially to prove that his girlfriend Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas) talks in her sleep. The first couple of clips are relatively benign, albeit with the sort of intimate details that might make some people uncomfortable with listening to them. But Evy and Justin press on, and discover that something extremely unnerving happened to the couple, and that hearing it threatens Evy with a similar fate.
From the start, there’s a likable Scully-and-Mulder dynamic between Evy and Justin that’s engagingly played by Kiri and DiMarco (the latter replacing Kris Holden-Reid, who voiced Justin when the film first showed at festivals last year). We get a strong sense of Justin’s insatiable curiosity about the unknown without ever seeing him, as he analyzes, for example, the darker hidden meanings in children’s songs. Evy, meanwhile, is the skeptic and realist, and from all the religious paraphernalia strewn around her childhood home, it’s not hard to imagine it stems from resistance to the doctrine under which she grew up. To his credit, Tuason doesn’t force the underlying themes of undertone, which also include concerns about motherhood. He leaves them up to audience interpretation while using them to get under the viewer’s skin, as when baby cries become a creepy sonic motif.
Those are just one among the many ways Tuason uses his sound design (created by David Gertsman, with those audio files done by Dane Kelly) to tease and unsettle the audience. Everyday noises become startling and not-so-common sounds provoke shivers as Evy and Justin get deeper and deeper into Mike and Jessa’s plight. Tuason demonstrates a skilled command and control of the camera as well, as he and cinematographer Graham Beasley use slow lateral camera moves and off-center framing, encouraging us to wait nervously for something scary to enter the image. (Watching undertone, it’s no surprise that the Paranormal Activity producing team recruited Tuason for the upcoming reboot.) While the approach becomes more aggressive as the film goes on, some of the spookier moments are more subtle, as when the combination of sound and image suggests that Mike and Jessa’s frightening history is repeating itself in the place it originally occurred.
Kiri rises to the challenge of carrying a story in which she’s in every scene, evoking our sympathy as Evy struggles with the care of her bed-ridden, barely conscious mom and deals as rationally as she can with an increasingly irrational and uncanny situation. One of many recent horror films to derive tension from the tribulations of grief, undertone gradually and seamlessly weaves in the occult trappings until Evy’s life becomes a nightmare she never could have imagined. At its core, it evokes the fear we’ve all felt hearing mysterious sounds while alone in the house at night — even as it’s best enjoyed and appreciated from a theater seat.
