Undertone

Ian Tuason's directorial debut, Undertone, is a horror movie that has the nerve to trust your ears over your eyes. And it works.

The setup is simple: Evy (Nina Kiri) is a paranormal podcast host who's moved back home to watch her mother die. The two of them are the only people you ever actually see on screen. Everyone else, her podcast co-host, the couple whose terrifying recordings land in her inbox, the demon slowly making itself at home in all of it, is a voice. A sound. A feeling at the back of your neck.

That's Tuason's big swing, and it's a good one. This is found-footage horror with no visual footage. The horror lives entirely in the audio, in reversed nursery rhymes and distorted whispers and the specific silence that comes right before something awful. The sound design does heavy narrative lifting here and earns every second of it.

The dread builds the right way. Slow, patient, almost polite about it, and then suddenly you realize you are in very deep water. By the time the film detonates in its final act, you've been cooked so gradually you didn't notice the temperature rising. That's harder to pull off than it sounds.

Nina Kiri carries nearly the whole thing on her shoulders. Watching a skeptic get cracked open is a reliable horror engine, and she makes Evy's unraveling feel earned rather than inevitable. Michèle Duquet, as the dying mother, barely gets any lines and somehow haunts the whole film anyway.

The weak points are where Tuason hedges. A few plot turns retreat into familiar supernatural territory when the premise had room to go somewhere stranger. The ending reaches for a specific kind of madness it doesn't quite achieve. There's a version of this movie that goes fully off the rails and doesn't come back, and I wanted that version.

The ending shows just enough madness to drive it home. A glimpse, a twist, then back into the darkness again for the final moments. It’s brilliant that Tuason trusts his conceit to close it out. Full circle.

Go see this in a theater with good sound. That's not a gimmick recommendation. The film was built for Dolby Atmos and it shows. In a living room, Undertone is unsettling. In the dark, with a system that can make a whisper feel like it's coming from just over your shoulder, it's something else.

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Note: This film was quite the passion project for the director. Tuason filmed in his childhood home, where he cared for both parents through terminal cancer diagnoses. Both died there.