Sound is a critically underrated aspect of film. Common wisdom seems to be that visuals are the most important aspect of a movie, after all you’re WATCHING a movie, aren’t we? We stress the visual fidelity in presentation, pay more for HD, 4K, IMAX, etc. That said, there’s nothing that will pull you out of the immersion of a story faster than poor sound. Your brain just knows when something is off. Even low budget films with the most amateur of visuals can still snag your attention if you’re engaged aurally. It’s this one simple trick that allows Undertone to create a thick stew of dread and atmosphere with the barest of other ingredients. Premiering last July at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, Director/Writer Ian Tuason’s micro-budget horror film was immediately gobbled up by A24, slightly retooled, and given the log line ‘the scariest movie you’ll ever hear’. They’re probably not wrong, but we’ll get to that.
The film follows Evy (Nina Kiri), a young recovering alcoholic who has moved into her concerningly religious, dying mother’s cramped house to be the primary caregiver before her mom’s imminent passing. Evy’s only other personal connection seems to be remotely co-hosting a paranormal/creepypasta podcast, which only ever records at 3am for reasons we never get into. The format of the pod is simple: Evy plays the skeptical Scully to her co-host Justin’s believer Mulder (Adam DiMarco), whom we only hear and never see. In fact, that’s the movie’s secret weapon: we never actually see anyone besides Evy and her ominously silent mother. This allows for an interesting immersion into Evy’s isolated point of view as unpleasant events progress and a horror movie breaks loose.
Things start going off the rails when her podcast is anonymously sent ten audio recordings of a young pregnant couple who are experiencing paranormal noises. As Evy and Justin dive deeper into each clip, Evy begins to see similarities between her own life and the increasingly disturbing couple. Evy finds out she too is pregnant and as the clips grow more upsetting and supernatural, they continue to mirror Evy’s own life; each new recording seems to break down her reality, drawing her into a confusingly surreal confrontation she cannot escape.
While I suspect the final few minutes of the film will be polarizing for viewers and will make or break a lot of final opinions, the film is 90% a nerve-racking pressure cooker even if it maybe doesn’t quite stick the landing. What makes the film so unsettling is just how restrained it is. The sound design and composition do the heavy lifting to create a palpable unease: Patient sequences of dark, looming hallways paired with ambient, upsetting sounds that let your brain run wild. The static wide-angle shots are composed to keep us on our toes. We sit in dread, eyes darting into the distance, sitting with that feeling an unknown something is just about to emerge from the darkness in the empty space behind Evy’s shoulder. It’s the good stuff.
You see, a lot of modern horror films rely on the catch and release style of tension with jump scares. We anticipate something in the dark, the music cuts out, tension is raised, we jump at the reveal, usually with music sting (just in case you’re blind) and the tension is released. Buildup. Relief. Rinse. Repeat. Instead of conventional jump scares at regular intervals, director Ian Tuason deftly provides us with dense liminal moments to soak in. On a shoestring budget with a single location and only 2 onscreen actors, Tuason does an incredible job with the few tools he has at his disposal and gauged by that metric, the film is a success. While the acting isn’t always exceptional, the cinematography and sound design is. The Dolby Atmos mix allows us to feel Evy’s subjective experience both when she puts on her noise-cancelling podcast headphones and when she takes them off and the ambient nightmare sounds follow her into the real world. As mentioned, this film features no cheap jump scares and thus no relief; the ballon of anxiety just keeps filling and expanding until it bursts into an audio cacophony of a climax. Your mileage may vary on the payoff of that climax, but there’s no question road that took you there was worth traveling. | Joseph C. Roussin
