For Evangeline “Evy” Babig (Nina Kiri), the thirty-something co-host of a popular paranormal-themed podcast, “The Undertone,” in Canadian writer-director Ian Tuason’s promising, occasionally frustrating, feature-length debut, Undertone, podcast co-hosting provides Evy with an essential, if temporary, respite from caregiving for her terminally ill, near-mute mother (Michèle Duquet), and relationship issues centered around an unplanned pregnancy and a floundering relationship with a longtime, offscreen boyfriend. Evy has returned, less by deliberate choice than familial obligation, to the same home where she was raised to adulthood. Within days, weeks, or, less likely given her deteriorating conditions, months, her mother will depart this mortal plane with Evy nearby, if not at her side.
Liminally suspended between grief and mourning, the former personal, the latter public, Evy distracts herself from her grim, everyday reality through the weekly podcast she co-hosts with Justin (voiced by a heard, but never-seen Adam DiMarco), a longtime friend and an ex-pat currently living in London. Between Evy’s caregiving responsibilities and living in different countries with different time zones, scheduling their recording sessions requires a combination of effort and flexibility.
As a result, Evy and Justin record their podcasting sessions well past the stygian midnight hour. Alone except for Justin’s calming, disembodied voice in her headphones and her restless mother sleeping in an upstairs bedroom, Evy begins to experience — and with her, the audience on the other side of the screen — temporal dislocation, spatial disorientation, and ultimately, an existential threat, one linked to European folklore and demonology.
Recorded across several, increasingly fraught nights, Justin introduces a dubious Evy to audio files attached to an email forwarded to him by an anonymous listener. In turn, the recordings introduce Evy to a married couple, Mike (Jeff Yung) and Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas). The files begin harmlessly enough as a concerned Mike records his rambling, sleepwalking wife, but grow ominous the longer he records, and the longer audience-surrogate Evy listens to the audio files in sequential, chronological order. Performatively self-identifying as the skeptic to Justin’s true-believer, Evy initially dismisses the audio files as a put-on, a prank, or even a joke, albeit an elaborately staged one by a listener with too much time on their hands and a twisted sense of humor.
Soon enough, of course, things begin to go bump in the night. Already crushed by guilt, shame, and self-loathing about her mother’s impending death, Evy begins the slow, not unexpected descent into a psychological collapse. Utilizing negative space in an effective, gripping manner, specifically the shadow-heavy corners of the dining room and the surrounding environs where Evy records the podcast with Justin, Tuason gradually — perhaps too gradually for horror fans of a certain vintage or temperament — builds tension and suspense through an often deft combination of aural and visual cues. Evy’s noise-canceling headphones, limiting what she hears versus what the audience hears, also play a key role in the nerve-shredding narrative.
In Undertone’s most eerie, macabre plot turn, Tuason transmutes innocuous nursery rhymes, “London Bridge” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” played at varying speeds and, more importantly, in reverse, into an entryway through which a sinister entity invades Evy’s world. Tuason deliberately echoes the Satanic Panic of the ‘80s and ‘90s and the hidden messages fringe conspiracy theorists claimed to have found in heavy rock music. Once the entity crosses over into Evy’s world, it’s not leaving anytime soon, at least not without blood sacrifices made in its name or unlucky souls snatched and sent back to a demonic overlord.
Unfortunately, Tuason sets aside the sonic subtleties of the first and second acts for decidedly sonorous unsubtleties in Undertone’s third act. Where Tuason, the David Gertsman-led sound design team, and cinematographer, Graham Beasley, leaned heavily into the intricate, elegant possibilities of the single-location premise, specifically the introduction of Evy, Justin, and the exploration of the mysterious audio files on their podcast, Tuason and his collaborators deliberately embrace over-familiar jumps, shocks, and scares, many of them telegraphed well before they appear in the film.
Disappointing final act aside, there’s much in Undertone for the serious horror fan and the horror-curious to appreciate, even enjoy, from Kiri’s pitch-perfect performance as an uncentered, unmoored woman gradually succumbing to irrational forces beyond her control, Tuason’s compelling, unobtrusive direction, the latter an obvious calling card for future projects.
Undertone premiered at the 29th Fantasia International Film Festival last year. It opens theatrically in North America on Friday, March 13th, via A24 in the United States and VVS Films in Canada.
