Evy (Nina Kira) and Justin (Adam DiMarco) are co-hosts of The Undertone, a podcast dedicated to all things unsettling and unexplained. As they live in different parts of the world, they record their sessions remotely, usually in what is for Evy the witching hour. Undertone is also the name of writer/director Ian Tuason’s impressive debut feature – and much as Evy and Justin’s audio-only show conjures spookiness from mere speech and sound, the sole characters seen in Tuason’s eponymous film are Evy and her devout, dying Mama (Michèle Duquet) upstairs, while Justin and other characters are reduced to their voices.
In other words, this is, like Eitan Arrusi’s Reverb (2007), Alanté Kavaïté’s Écoute le temps (2007), Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012), Ben Wheatley’s In The Earth (2021) and Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap (2025), a film where the auditory is privileged over the visual, and where found footage is replaced by found sound as the medium that conjures paranormal intrusion (or at least panicky breakdown).
While Undertone confines itself to the two-floor house where Evy is engaged in a vigil over her still (but barely) living Mama, the sounds and associated psychodramas from a series of ten creepy audio files sent anonymously to Justin start to bleed into this space, and to unnerve Evy with their uncanny incantations and evocations of domestic invasion, as though merely by playing them she is letting something demonic into the house.
On their podcast, Justin and Evy have assigned rôles – the former as believer, the latter as sceptic – to ensure that their conversation remains dynamic and dramatic. This is not really who they are, and they have enough self-awareness regarding the parts they are playing that when they slip and let their less binary, more fluid selves momentarily take over, one or other of them will say openly that they need to get “back in character”. In a sense Tuason invites the viewer (or listener) into a similar dialectic, offering us rational and irrational readings of what is happening in the house, and challenging us simultaneously to believe (or at least suspend disbelief), and to question or doubt.
Certainly it is possible to regard Evy, a recovering alcoholic with an unwelcome pregnancy and a shaky Catholic faith, as mentally unravelling under pressure, in the face of her isolation, her grief for the not-quite-dead, and her strong sense of guilt. After all, the intense emotional journey that Evy is undertaking with her comatose mother would mess with anyone’s head, and especially with the impressionable mind of someone who hardly ever seems to sleep and who is rapidly returning to the demon drink for supposed self-medication. Evy is fragile and vulnerable – precisely the kind of person likely to prove susceptible to suggestion and paranoia, hearing the devil in a house’s every creak and crack at night. Or maybe an ancient mythic female entity, spread by sound and spell, really is insinuating itself into Evy’s little closed world with malicious designs on the baby inside her. This could go either way, as supernatural incursion or psychological collapse.
David Gertsman’s sound design here is impeccable for the way it gradually haunts these interiors with the layered noises of other places and parallel narratives, but special mention should also go to DP Graham Beasley, who uses the house’s shadowy backgrounds as negative spaces onto which we can project all manner of fears. Several times, as Evy, shot from behind, sits at the living room table before her microphone and computer, the camera drifts slowly away and around to the empty rooms beyond, and here something as innocuous as a slow, simple pan proves utterly terrifying, like the accelerated time code in Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity (2007).
It is not what we see in these mobile shots that is frightening – for there is literally nothing there – but rather what we anticipate and imagine that we will see. For it is in the mind – Evy’s and ours – that this film’s horror truly resides, until a chaotic climax unleashes all these darkest thoughts and feelings into inexplicable yet tangibly present pandemonium, like an anxiety made manifest, a nightmare reified, or a fragile brain snapping and giving in to its worst demons. By the end, what lingers across the airwaves is ambiguity and uncertainty, as we are left in the dark as to what exactly Evy has experienced, and how it might relate to an unsourced, possibly fictive set of recordings – but of course, like someone listening to a song played in reverse for hidden, backmasked messages, you will hear what you want to hear.
strap: Inner ear: Ian Tuason’s impressive debut feature exposes a pregnant podcaster to the echoing sounds of her own grief, guilt and demons
© Anton Bitel
