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Nina Kiri in Undertone (2025)
Nina Kiri in Undertone (2025)
In Undertone, Evy cohosts a podcast “where we talk about all things creepy” with Justin, a friend she hasn’t seen in years. Their subject is the paranormal. Evy is the skeptic, if not the cynic, while Justin wants to believe that the truth is out there somewhere. The already strained normalcy of Evy’s life starts to unravel when Justin shares an increasingly strange series of audio files sent him anonymously. With only gentle prodding from Justin, she begins … hearing things.
After debuting at last year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, Undertone has finally received its U.S. theatrical debut. Canadian director Ian Tuason originally conceived it as a radio play and his screenplay is an audio drama at heart. Aside from Evy’s mother, comatose in her sick bed, Evy (Nina Kiri) is the only film’s face. Justin and a slender handful of secondary characters are voices heard but unseen.
Evy’s stressful caretaking for a mother only days from death was inspired by Tuason’s own experience with parents dying from cancer. He even filmed Undertone in his family home, enhancing the verisimilitude. The setting is familiar to anyone who has witnessed an elder’s end days: the pill bottles on the nightstand, the port-o-potty and wheelchair in the corner, a hospice nurse voicing an answer to an unanswerable question. “Can she hear me?” Evy asks. “No one can know for sure … but I’d like to believe they can,” the nurse says.
Evy’s dogmatic devotion to “logic and reason,” her friendly jibes against Justin’s open-ended worldview, is probably a reaction to her mother’s stalwart Roman Catholicism. The house is filled with Catholic imagery, often kitsch but occasionally relevant, especially the handheld statue of Mary that reappears despite Evy’s efforts to hide it away. When informed of her unwanted pregnancy, she tells the doctor (on the phone) that she “needs time to think about my options.” Will guilt become another element in the toxic unease that gradually overtakes her?
The plot moves forward as Justin shares the audio files, apparently recorded by the husband (Mike) of a woman (Jessa) who sleepwalks and begins to sing in her sleep. Justin plays her sketchy version of “London Bridge is Falling Down,” slowing it, and discerns the words “Mike kills all,” which triggers an online search on the London Bridge and the claim that orphan children were buried alive beneath the cornerstones. Googling her favorite lullaby, “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” she discovers an unsavory origin story for the lyric. Playing a recording of the song backwards, she starts to hear “loot and lick the blood off.” Perhaps the old children’s songs began as cautionary tales warning of the evil adults can do? Soon enough, Evy hears sounds from within the house and finds a faucet running where no hand has been—and that flickering of electric lights that has become a malign indicator in the vocabulary of psychological horror films.
Pregnant from the first 15 minutes with potential menace, quiet with scant dialogue, Undertone is attuned to the slightest sound as it accumulates a succession of unsettling details. It’s the most imaginative horror film since Jennifer Kent’s Babadook (2014), and part of the horror rises from Evy’s social isolation and growing immersion in digital webs of rumor, conspiracy and patterns of meaning that become apparent when you look or listen too hard.
Hearing is believing. With Undertone, an indie director pulls off a psychologically unsettling film on a modest budget. Tuason is working in a tradition established by horror pioneers Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur, who understood that what is left unseen can be scarier than what is shown. After the success of Undertone at festivals opened the door to Hollywood, Tuason is scheduled to direct Paranormal Activity 8. Hopefully, he will be able to bring invention and creativity to the franchise and not be sucked into the blandness of the contemporary entertainment industry.
