The first thing that stands out about Undertone is its quietness—not just in the audio design, but also in its cinematography, which relies heavily on steady wide shots that glide slowly over empty spaces, making your eyes dart around frantically looking for anything out of place. This subtle approach to filmmaking amplifies the impact of the movie’s frights, and once those scares arrive, they stick with you for an surprisingly long period.
The film centers on Evy (Nina Kiri), the resident skeptic co-hosting a paranormal podcast with her old friend Justin (Adam DiMarco), who’s the believer in the duo. Justin receives a series of odd audio files via an anonymous email and shares them with Evy during a live podcast episode. These recordings seem to feature a couple, Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas) and Mike (Jeff Yung), who started recording their nights after Jessa began speaking mysteriously while asleep. As the recordings continue, the sounds they capture grow more menacing and start to affect Evy’s life in increasingly threatening ways.
A key premise—and major strength—of Undertone is that Evy and her sick mother (Michèle Duquet) are the only characters who appear on screen throughout the film. Evy moved into her mom’s house to care for her during her terminal illness, and she’s mostly stuck at home waiting for her mother’s passing. Her podcast, which she records at 3 a.m. to fit Justin’s UK schedule, is her only source of solace. All these factors, plus an absent boyfriend who calls now and then to try to get Evy out of the house, combine to create the perfect storm of stressors that make Evy the next target of the demonic curse released by the audio recordings.
At first, Evy is a total skeptic. Early recordings show Jessa singing children’s songs in her sleep, which she has no memory of upon waking. Evy points out that Jessa and Mike are expecting a baby, so it’s natural for children to be on her mind. But Justin excitedly leads them down a rabbit hole of conspiracies about reversed children’s songs, and Evy goes along reluctantly. Things get even weirder when Jessa starts speaking gibberish, which Justin and Evy find out is a backward chant summoning a demon. Meanwhile, strange occurrences start happening at Evy’s house at night: her mother, who’s almost comatose in bed, seems to move in her sleep; faucets turn on by themselves; and the many Christian items scattered around the creaky, dusty house (Evy’s mom was very religious) start to look off—for example, a Virgin Mary statue keeps appearing on her mom’s bedside table, each time with more babies crawling up its robes.
To be honest, Undertone doesn’t break new ground in demon possession or haunted house films—in fact, Jessa and Mike’s audio recordings are a lot like listening to Paranormal Activity. But like Paranormal Activity before it, Undertone feels like a bold, fresh evolution of the horror genre. Thanks to writer-director Ian Tuason’s steady direction and Kiri’s powerful lead performance (which balances steeliness and vulnerability), the film’s audio-focused premise doesn’t come off as a cheap gimmick. It’s sparse where it needs to be and uses jump scares effectively—often choosing to hold back instead of going for the usual shock. Undertone’s core idea of a cursed media file passing from person to person will draw plenty of comparisons to The Ring, but its tendency to withhold information is actually more similar to the original Japanese Ringu, a film defined by slowly building dread until it reaches a fatal climax in the final minutes.
Similarly, Undertone plays with the expectations of experienced horror viewers: a bathroom cabinet mirror swings open and shut to reveal nothing, a slow pan across a room shows only empty corners. The scariest parts of Undertone are actually the things you can’t see—its terrifying climax happens when the screen cuts to black, leaving only Evy’s screams and inhuman sounds to accompany you. This is a testament to the film’s top-notch audio production (best experienced in Dolby Atmos or, even better, through headphones) that such a scene can be so frightening and chilling without anything happening on screen.
Many horror films have tried to capture the feeling of reading a creepypasta—an online urban legend that spreads through dark corners of 4chan threads or obscure YouTube links. But Undertone is one of the few that nails that sense of accidentally stumbling onto something purely evil by clicking the wrong link or getting stuck in a digital rabbit hole. It’s a terrifying new thriller for the internet era, one that will stay with you long after the credits end.
Undertone is currently playing in theaters.