The first thought that popped into my mind while watching “Undertone” was: I always knew podcasting was terrifying. The second thought was: but it’s not all that inherently cinematic, is it?
“Undertone,” written and directed by Ian Tuason, follows Evy (Nina Kiri), a podcaster who moves back home to play caretaker to her devoutly religious and dying mother (Michèle Duquet). Her mother is essentially comatose, paused seemingly endlessly on the brink of death, meaning Evy spends her days trapped in a very specific, guilt-wracked boredom familiar to anyone who has had to watch a loved one die. Evy doesn’t want it to happen, but if it’s going to, she’d rather it happen quickly.
Her only break from the dread is her paranormal-centric podcast, where she plays the role of professional skeptic as her co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco, although we only hear his voice) tries to convince her that everything from ghosts to the devil walk among us. Evy is not so easily swayed, however. She’s good at finding the logical explanation – this is a girl who no longer attends mass, despite the fact that she grew up in a house filled with photos of Jesus. But when an anonymous email sends Evy and Justin recordings of a married couple experiencing some sort of haunting in their home, Evy starts to have similar experiences.
“Undertone” has been billed as the scariest movie you’ll ever hear, and that’s not a marketing promise that falls short – the sound design hits the mark. But that gimmick isn’t enough to sustain a host of other issues. When the film begins, you’re hit with all the trappings of a low-budget indie sensation. The characters are not all that fleshed out, the dialogue is not very good (Evy and Justin apparently podcast all the time, but in their first scene they talk to each other like it’s been 10 years since their last conversation). But, as with most horror movies, you withhold judgment. The scary stuff is the most important, after all – maybe that will make all the other stuff worth it.
Sometimes, it does (see “Primate). But “Undertone” finds itself at a strange intersection. It’s a movie built on a gimmick guaranteed to scare you out of your wits, but it’s also attempting to make a larger comment about religious anxiety, about guilt, about mothers and their children. In trying to be both high brow and scrappy, it loses steam in both lanes, the commentary it attempts to make so barely there that it feels maddening and more than a little careless.
One of the smart things “Undertone” does is build its horror out of the dregs of the internet. As Evy and Justin listen to these mysterious recordings – in which a man named Mike records his pregnant wife Jessa at night because she’s been talking in her sleep – Evy starts to go down rabbit holes in a way that feels horrifyingly familiar to anyone who has ever engaged with Creepypasta, searching for the hidden meanings in children’s songs and obsessively playing the clips backwards and forwards. Her listening sessions with Justin are often punctuated by him saying things like, “You heard that, right?” She never does, and the audience doesn’t either. But, the more she listens – and the more time she spends alone, with only a comatose woman for company – she starts to hear the same scary things as Justin.
The audio not only changes for Evy in these moments, but also for the audience – an effective way of putting us in her headspace, making us question whether what she’s hearing is real, or if she’s just going stir crazy. Filmmaking-wise, you’ll see those all-too familiar wide shots that permeate horror filmmaking these days – the ones that have you searching the entirety of the show, waiting for something to pop out of the background (don’t worry – in this movie, they rarely do). Those shots, while not that inventive, do keep you on the edge of your seat. But, not all the film’s choices are this effective.
In one of Evy and Justin’s first conversations, they talk about why there would be secret messages hidden within old-timey children’s songs, like “Ring Around the Rosie” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” Justin thinks the messages were a warning of sorts, pointing out the ways in which children suffer because of choices adults make. A few scenes later, our main character – drowning in the religious paraphernalia that fills her mother’s house – finds out she’s pregnant. And she clearly does not want to have the baby.
I don’t point this out because I think that “Undertone” is actively attempting to equate the idea of adults hurting children to abortion. But, its lack of intentionality with Evy’s character in particular makes the whole thing feel a little … icky. It’s more than clear that Evy grew up in a religious household, and the average person can probably extrapolate how people who grew up in religious households feel about the concept of abortion.
But – up until the point where she decides to get one – we have no notion of how Evy feels about it. We have no notion of how Evy feels about anything, really, beyond the fact that she’s made a living off of skepticism. We know she grew up religious, but we don’t know if she ever really bought in before she stopped going to mass. We know she stopped going to mass, but we don’t know if that decision was difficult or not. Her relationship to her mother is even less clear, but the film still tries to use her residual guilt over that relationship in a final, climactic moment (it lands with a thud).
How are we meant to understand Evy’s anxiety if we aren’t clued into her feelings to begin with? How can I expect a film to have interesting ideas about motherhood when Evy’s pregnancy test results take literal hours to come back (that isn’t how pregnancy tests work!)? “Undertone” so clearly wants to be about something, but it’s hard to make a clear point when those ideas are this underdeveloped – like a blip on audio recording that you can’t quite make out.