For a film so strongly based around the auditory experience, it’s a shame that Undertone ends up being simply a bunch of noise. I would consider myself a super-fan of most of the horror output of hip studio and distribution company A24, and even I could not excuse the clumsiness and downright laziness of this film. It mixes a bevy of horror clichés into an ultimately boring stew with very little flavor. There are some things I do appreciate about the film, but they’re few and far between.
Writer-director Ian Tuason’s debut feature follows young true-horror podcast host Evy (Nina Kiri) as she investigates a strange series of noises sent to her and her co-host Justin (voice of Adam DiMarco) via mp3 files in email attachments. Justin lives in London, and Evy is looking after her dying mother (Michèle Duquet) in her family home somewhere in rural America, so they record episodes at 3 AM central standard time to account for the time difference and Evy’s responsibilities in the daytime.
One in a series of poor choices Tuason makes is to have Evy’s mother be a total vegetable, which leaves this housebound film pretty much inert in terms of story beats. That’s not the only issue I have with that choice though, because, having lost my own mother to cancer, I have first-hand experience with the kind of liminal space of pre-grief Evy is going through. At first I thought this was going to be a very tough and emotional film for me to sit through for that reason, but as it went on and got hokier and sillier, I realized that Undertone could never hope to do those emotions justice. It’s just using them to do less than nothing.
I will give credit where credit is due: the sound design here is actually effective and keeps you guessing, at least for the first act. However, as the film hits a much slower gear around its middle, the novelty quickly wears off. Some of the types of sounds featured here are ones we truly haven’t heard in a horror film before, but when the visuals are completely rote and ripped-off from a thousand better demonic possession films, that’s when you run into major problems. While sound is vitally important, film is ultimately a visual medium. So when your visuals are not only not doing the heavy lifting, but hardly doing any lifting at all, a lot of the magic of the movies is lost. There is some visual craftsmanship in the fact that the film takes place solely inside Evy’s mother’s house, and I always enjoy when a house becomes a character in a film (see Best Picture nominee and my #2 film of 2025 Sentimental Value), but especially when Undertone could have gone all-out in its climax, it nearly refuses to do anything visually original.
A bit of a sidebar to wrap up here: I’m not a fan of the recently-coined phrase “elevated horror,” because I tend to think there is just good horror and bad horror, like any good film or bad film in any genre. Because a horror film has something on its mind doesn’t mean it’s automatically better or worse than other horror films which are more of a simple good time. We didn’t need a phrase like this before the decade-plus horror renaissance that has taken place since about the release of The Babadook, and we certainly don’t need one now.The phrase basically implies that films in the horror genre need some kind of asterisk to denote if they are intelligent — almost removing them from the horror genre entirely, thereby not giving the genre and its rich history credit on its own. It also implies that audiences expect or should expect horror films to be unintelligent, or that the horror genre was never intelligent prior to the invention of said phrase and the release of particular films. A24 has proven to be, and will probably remain for years to come, the kings of “elevated horror,” but Undertone is one of the biggest pretenders in that space I’ve ever seen. | George Napper
