Joel on Film

It would be far too easy to say that Undertone, about a pair of podcast co-hosts who are terrorized by a series of audio files while recording some episodes of their show, should just be an audio drama in itself. That might be just creepy enough to work, as proven by the mental experiment of trying to divorce the audio elements of writer/director Ian Tuason’s film from the visual ones. These are seriously unnerving bits of audio, after all, and uniquely so, because of the unifying feature within all of them.

The theme of the mystery that develops for Evy (Nina Kiri), the in-person host whose story this becomes, and Justin (voice of Adam DiMarco), who lives clear across the Atlantic, surrounds the subliminal messages that may or may not be present within recordings of English nursing rhymes of a century ago or more. It’s entirely possible that viewers of this movie will no longer think of tunes like “Baa Baa Black Sheep” or “London Bridge Is Falling Down” the same afterward. Then again, it’s also a point of pride within the movie that the filmmakers remind us of the dark past of some of these rhymes (and “Ring Around the Rosie,” perhaps the darkest of them all, only gets a fleeting mention).

Anyway, even the potential presence of subliminal messaging—meant to be detected when heard backward—is as much an open question as the reality of what begins to occur around the house in which Evy has been taking care of her dying mother (played by Michèle Duquet). If there is a slightly formulaic quality to the movie, it’s the scenes in which something goes bump at night, often while Evy is recording with Justin, but then again, that’s only a formulaic quality. In practice, it’s made to feel a little new again because of the way Tuason incorporates his scare tactics.

There are almost no jump scares here of any traditional variety, with the closest example being over the audio found in those files. Tuason allows the patience and the silence to do their work in these moments, with the camera—static between edits while the episodes are being recorded—gliding softly or oscillating slowly to reveal nothing immediately obvious about some feature of the home. The use of shadow is pervasive, forcing us to search the frame for anything off-kilter, even when it’s obvious that nothing of the sort will appear.

These are small differences from what usually happens under less skilled directors, especially because, on paper, it may not seem different at all. When a shape does materialize in the background, it’s always fuzzy and out-of-focus, to the point that it can only suggest to us what we already think it might be. Since dear old mum is dying, while lights turn on and doors close and ceramic figurines keep appearing where they shouldn’t, our immediate thoughts go to the idea that she can’t be quite dead: Indeed, that’s far too easy an explanation in a movie that goes out of its way to be ambiguous.

A more specific mystery also develops, which is what happened to the two people featured in the recordings: a couple named Mike (voice of Jeff Yung) and Jessa (voice of Keana Lyn Bastidas). We listen as they experience the same strange encounters by which Evy is being haunted, with Mike concerned about Jessa’s lack of sleep and a third addition arriving suddenly and ominously in the form of new life. Infants are the key to a lot of this, which bodes poorly for Evy, having just found out that she’s newly pregnant.

The combination of nursery rhymes and pending pregnancies within a horror-movie scenario should be an obvious sign of what’s to come, but even then, the ambiguity on display here is really admirable. Since nothing about the reality of Evy’s closed world (the film never leaves this house once) is clear, the fear is amplified—a word with an even more literal definition in this case. Kiri’s performance, which must hold the screen for its entirety on account of being the only active participant we see, conveys quite enough of the strain and building trauma of a tricky role.

Undertone sets out to achieve a specific goal—to be as unsettling as possible under very specific conditions. That’s why its visual elements, just as much as the expertly achieved audio ones (like the way the sound falls out when Evy snaps on her noise-canceling headphones, meaning we can’t trust that certain jarring noises are in her audio and not in ours), make this a distinctly cinematic and effectively creepy effort.

Rating: *** (out of ****)