Director – Ian Tuason – 2025 – Canada – Cert. 15 – 94m
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A co-host of a paranormal podcast is disturbed by ten mysterious sound files even as her elderly mother is nearing death in her bedroom upstairs – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, April 10th
A two person paranormal podcast comprises Evy Babic (Nina Kiri) and Justin (voice: Adam DiMarco) in a good cop / bad cop routine. Adam’s good cop is always willing to believe – or at least hoping – that the incident or phenomena underlying the latest episode is real, however strange or unlikely it might be. Evy’s bad cop always assumes the phenomena are fake or a hoax, until or unless she has incontrovertible evidence that suggests otherwise.
We never see Justin since the movie focuses on Evy living in her house and Justin only appears (on the soundtrack) as her co-host when they go live on air or in conversation with her on the phone outside of that recording / broadcasting process. You might think that focusing on the subject of the paranormal would drive someone off the deep end, but for Evy, doing the podcast with Justin is the one thing that keeps her sane. Because Evy is living through trying family circumstances. Upstairs in the same house, Evy’s elderly mother (Michèle Duquet) is slowly dying, with the emphasis on slowly. No-one quite knows when she will pass, and the whole process, traumatic enough anyway, is made worse by the woman’s growing weaker and weaker but, seemingly, never actually dying.
The latest episode of the podcast relates to a series of ten sound files that have been anonymously sent to Justin over the internet. He has listened to them and thinks there’s something there they can use. Quite possibly, their content is real. His plan is to have Evy listen to them for the first time on the air, so that her immediate reaction will become part of the show. Evy is up for this. As she (and we) listen to the files one at a time, and stay with Evy as she goes back over them, the show becomes two shows, with the two final recordings turned into a second episode.
The ten sound files contain recordings of a couple who become increasingly convinced that a malevolent force is watching them.
It’s strange that Evy should be the sceptic out of the two podcasters, because her mother is a Catholic and has raised her as such, and her mother’s room is full of Catholic iconography. Evy is trying her best to be the dutiful daughter and take care for her mother through her dying process, but lacks the support of a faith herself. Such situational roles are undeniably difficult and trying, and as Evy works through this particular podcast, it starts to affect her. Perhaps she will slip over the edge. Or, perhaps, something out there in the real world of Evy and her mother’s home, as suggested by the sound files, is out to get her.
The sucker punch to all this is that writer-director Tuason came at directing features from an unexpected angle: 360 degree immersive sound. (If we talk about cinema sound coming from more than one source speaker, that film technology that can be traced right back to Disney’s attempts to reproduce the sound of an entire concert orchestra performing in Fantasia, 1940).
The film has been promoted to press as a horror film where the horror is created via the use of sound, but watching it that doesn’t exactly feel to be the case. Tuason likes to use house interiors as places where you see (or think you see) something that’s not quite right for a moment. The visuals poorly echo seminal J-horror Pulse aka Kairo (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001) which marshalled such elements far more effectively. The other touchstone here would be low budget shocker Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007) with its unsettling overall atmosphere. Undertone simply isn’t in the same league as either.
The director gets into similar trickery with his device of the sound files, having characters play sections backwards in an attempt to unearth hidden elements within the recordings. He also plays around with strange sounds in different parts of the house. Speaking as a viewer / listener who normally pays great attention to the sound mix on films, the use of the sound field here, with sounds playing around different areas of the cinema auditorium, doesn’t really feel that unsettling. It should have done: I really wanted the use of sound here to blow me away. It didn’t.
There might be much to admire in the ideas behind the production: the clever sometimes naturalistic, sometimes eerie now you see it now you don’t, production design by Mercedes Coyle and cinematography by Graham Beasley; the solid performances by the two women (including the near comatose-appearing Duquet) and the supporting voice cast. And yet, such undeniable assets prove nowhere near enough to compensate for a would-be immersive horror experience which feels like a lot of sound and fury ultimately signifying nothing.
As I watched, I kept thinking that this should have been a memorably unsettling little shocker which had somehow utterly failed to achieve its modest ends. Had it worked, it would have had me on the edge of my seat. Sadly, it didn’t.
Undertone is out in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on Friday, April 10th.
Trailer: