Time: 94 Minutes
Age Rating: M – Offensive language
Cast:
Nina Kiri as Evangeline “Evy” Babic
Adam DiMarco as the voice of Justin Manuel
Director: Ian Tuason

I was curious about Undertone, I heard some positive things about it, and it heard that it had to do with being haunted by things found online. While there were some good aspects about it, on the whole, I was left quite underwhelmed.

The set up for the movie is decent, if not entirely original. It takes a minimalist approach, it’s set in one house as a host of a podcast listens to haunted audio files. I am all for an atmospheric horror movie that’s minimalist and a slow burn, with the creeping unease and tension coming just from the sound. However, it just didn’t work for me. I think it really fell off in its first 30 minutes and the rest of the runtime was a bit of a slog. Much of it is the two leads listening to 10 spooky audio files, and they are mildly ominous, but it just wasn’t scary for me. It certainly didn’t get scarier for me when they listen to classic nursery rhymes backwards and them sounding scary and ominous. If there’s a way for that idea to be scary for me, Undertone didn’t pull it off. But its faults come from more than just whether audio sound files or reversed songs alone can generate horror. The movie becomes repetitive very quickly. I liked the concept of the main characters running a podcast, and then noticing cursed things during the filming of a casual episode. However, what would happen is that they would listen to some sound files, get spooked, the protagonist would stop the podcast recording, and then weird things happen around her. Then they come back to the podcast on another day to repeat it all over. Not to propose that Undertone should be a completely different movie, but I felt that if it was a much tighter movie that focussed on just the recording of the podcast as the hosts explore all 10 audio files while experiencing strange happenings in their own environments, it might’ve been able to sustain the tension and overall make make for a more riveting movie. On top of that, it would also be a far more realistic situation instead of them only recording 5-10 minutes a night before calling it a night. The main reason for the interruptions is that there is a subplot about the protagonist being a caretaker for her mother, and while thematically there’s a reason for its inclusion, any time it switches from the audio files to this aspect, all built up tension evaporates. Also, the subplot itself was rather half baked. The protagonist isn’t developed enough for the ideas and themes of religious trauma and motherhood to pay off at all, and I just wasn’t invested in the subplot at all. Even when things eventually escalate and dial up in the third act, I was so checked out of the movie that it didn’t really matter.

The performances by Nina Kiri and Adam DiMarco (the latter of whom we only hear as a voice) are quite good. They fit podcasters the podcaster roles well based on their interactions, and Kiri effectively expresses her fear through her reactions to all the disturbances over the course of the movie.

Ian Tuason’s direction is decent. The sound design is the most effective part of the movie, and was in fact the thing carrying the whole movie. The camerawork is pretty good, I appreciate that they were trying to convey the horror mainly through sound, but I wished that more was actually done with the visuals.

Undertone is an atmospheric horror film, well directed and with good performances and sound design, but fails to generate or sustain horror and tension, and becomes rather predictable and underwhelming by the end.