RIOTUS

The new paranormal horror film Undertone was a hard sell for me when I saw the trailer for this film back in February. Could you really sell a horror film based on just sound, and with the main character being a podcast host recording a podcast? After I finished the film, I have to say it didn’t completely work for me. The basis of the film is a young woman named Evy – short for Evangeline, played by Nina Kiri – who is at her mother’s house, being her mother’s stay-at-home nurse while she’s comatose. She records a podcast with her friend and co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco) called Undertone, where they talk about stories of mysterious happenings in a dynamic that feels like Mulder and Scully on the X-Files. Things start getting weird when they start listening to a set of audio files about an expecting couple and the wife’s sleepwalking mystery. Life for Evy gets very weird, and the elements in the audio recordings might be happening to her.

What worked for me first of all is the audio; the film does use sound incredibly well. I saw the film in a Dolby Cinema theater and in a theater with such amazing sound quality that every creek, breath, and step stands out when watching the film. The film uses reverse recordings and audio under another piece of audio, and hearing the two people try to figure out what they were listening to is compelling to watch. Ian Tuason, the director, has some great use of close-ups and camera pans. The camera movement, in concert with how sounds are used to raise the tension for the audience, is highly effective in some key moments. There is also some creative use of angles in how he shoots the main and mostly only actress on screen, Nina Kiri, through most of the film.

With her carrying so much of the film on her shoulders, Tuason found some different ways to have the camera on her face, especially when some of the film is just her listening at a table with headphones on. Tuason wrote the screenplay as well, and the film has some interesting themes it’s exploring with motherhood, womanhood, their bodies, and the whole nature of fairytales and songs we sing to babies, being actually warnings or tales of terrible things happening to children. Michèle Duquet’s Mother character, I feel, represents this even though she doesn’t do much but lie there. The mystery Evy is investigating, and pregnancy comes together with ideas I’ve seen in other films lately, interrogating the themes of motherhood, having horror-like elements—that loss of control.

Now, while I like some of this stuff and the ideas, the film just felt so stagnant for a large part of it. It felt like it was working hard to fill those ninety-four minutes of run time. After the initial setup, while there were some parts that picked up, it felt like some scenes and even shots were longer than they needed to be for effectiveness, to meet feature length. The last fifteen minutes or so, everything goes bonkers, and while you’re in it, it feels a little too late to me. I was already a bit bored, and the actual last shot didn’t work on me. Kiri is doing great with her performance, but sometimes it feels like a boring twitch stream of a real-life version of the lofi studying girl.

I think the film wants to play with the satanic panic of the 70s and 80s and recontextualize it, but I feel like I might be grasping at straws there. For those who don’t know, it was a time when adults felt that the media was influencing the children into worshiping the devil. A big target was Dungeons and Dragons, a new game at the time, and rock music that, when played backwards, revealed their secret demonic messages. Taking the ideas from that panic and applying them to a paranormal podcast does kind of work, but it feels more like decoration than a core theme, as it wants to explore other things more connected to motherhood. In contrast, the satanic panic does connect to children and parenting, which might have been something that could’ve added more to the middle part of the film to stop it from feeling a bit meandering for a large portion of the runtime.

I feel this movie does well by being a great showcase for Kiri and her acting talent. She has to keep the viewer captivated, mostly all on her own, in a very limited number of settings. Most of the time, we just see her in her mother’s bedroom, the bathroom, and the dining/living room. Her eyes play a big role in communicating her mood and level of uneasiness and fear. So while I really like Kiri and I think the film has some good moments, I just don’t know. I think in the end it’s not for a person like me. I wished I liked it more, but it just became boring for me, and I only had serious interest for 35 minutes of the runtime. Undertone didn’t work for me at all, but there is some stuff there, and it might work for others. It has a creepy atmosphere with a real lack of scares and threats. It is a movie that works best in a theater with great sound, or when you do watch at home, you should watch with headphones that have 3D sound and noise cancellation.