Undertone is a low-budget Canadian horror film that does a lot with a little.
Photo: Dustin Rabin/A24
As someone who has podcasted in the past and has begun podcasting yet again in the present, I have a few quibbles about the setup of the show at the center of the new horror movie Undertone. Like, why does Evy (Nina Kiri) only ever record the podcast Undertone, an exploration of spooky phenomena in which she plays the skeptic to her friend Justin’s (Adam DiMarco) credulity, at three in the morning? Writer-director Ian Tuason tries to justify that time frame by locating Justin multiple time zones away across the Atlantic in London, but it still doesn’t make a lick of sense. Why would he cram in their digital meet-ups before rushing off to work in the morning instead of just doing it when he gets home, given that his East Coast co-host is serving as a live-in caretaker for her dying mother (Michèle Duquet) and has nothing but time on her hands? And, considering that they don’t appear to be streaming their recording sessions live, why would they try to take calls during this incredibly inconvenient late-night window? Have they never heard of voice-mail?
The answer to all of these questions is, of course, that the movie’s way is creepier, even as its setup sometimes strains credulity. Undertone, Tuason’s feature debut, is a low-budget Canadian affair that does a lot with a little. It takes place entirely within the confines of Evy’s childhood home, which is played by Tuason’s family’s house in Toronto, and doesn’t venture outside on the rare occasions that its main character does. Kiri and Duquet are the only cast members who appear onscreen — DiMarco is heard but never seen — and Duquet’s character is nonresponsive and confined to her bed. Undertone leans into the claustrophobia of Evy’s situation, both in terms of her reluctance to stray far from her mother in case something happens, and in terms of the self-disgust and frustration she feels over putting her life on hold while she waits for her parent’s to end. Aside from Justin, a continent away, and an off-screen boyfriend she describes as barely able to take care of himself, let alone help out, her isolation is extreme. Enter a series of mysterious audio files sent by a stranger to the show’s email address, with a warning to be careful about listening to them all. The recordings, which the co-hosts decide to listen and react to as they go, are of a couple who claims to be experiencing strange phenomena in their sleep, with the wife muttering things she doesn’t remember when awake.
Undertone was picked up by A24 out of Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival, and it fits into the studio’s art-house horror lane in terms of look and feel. Its best trick, one that Tuason and cinematographer Graham Beasley make frequent use of, is arranging shots full of negative space. Evy records at her dining room table, with the rest of the house shrouded in darkness, and we’re always acutely aware of the inky void behind her as she sits with noise-canceling headphones on, oblivious to what might be going on around her. The layered aural landscapes of the recording, which soon include strange banging noises, rustling, children’s songs played backward, and the sound of faucets being turned on, adds to the sense of precariousness. When Evy looks over her shoulder, it’s unclear if she thinks she’s hearing something in the house underneath the recordings she’s listening to, or if she’s just upset by the increasingly disturbing material, even if she pretends not to be. We’re all accustomed to relying on headphones to swaddle us from the world, but that also means being cut off from the potentially frightening things happening around us.
Despite the artfulness with which Undertone was crafted, it ultimately owes more to Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project than it does to Hereditary or Saint Maud. While it’s one layer removed from found footage, the audio recordings bring to mind Oren Peli’s 2007 blockbuster. And the explanations that Evy reluctantly stumbles upon, involving a demon named Abyzou, have the cobbled-together-on-the-fly feel of the mythos behind the 1999 classic. Tuason’s film is lodged in the realm of creepypastas and online lore to a fault. When Evy starts frantically Googling the dark backstories to all the nursery rhymes she knows, it’s not unsettling but painfully juvenile, like someone freaking themselves out over internet horror stories about the dark secrets of Disneyland. But Undertone’s weakest element is the now de rigueur effort to link Evy’s experiences to personal trauma. It serves up a slurry of Catholic guilt and internalized shame as the underwhelming explanation for her emotional state; Kiri’s mournful, prickly performance is considerably more complex than that. Undertone is creepy enough without needing to knit its haunting into its main character’s background so clunkily; ironically, its most effective moments are ones of stylistic indifference. When the camera slowly and steadily pivots around the ground floor with no acknowledgement of what might be unsettling about the space it’s surveying, it’s like Evy is already gone, relegated to the stuff of whispered-about urban legend herself.
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