Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. Be Afraid of the Silence with ‘undertone'.
By Natalie McCarty
What a perfect way to spend a Friday the 13th. You can’t get away from Undertone’s terror, even if you close your eyes.
Courtesy of A24
I’ve loved Nina Kiri since her The Handmaid’s Tale days, so I was elated to see her in a leading role here. She absolutely killed it. She even suggested seeing the film alone because it’s “part of the experience,” which I did—and I’m glad I listened.
Adam DiMarco was another welcome surprise. I had no idea he was even involved going in, but I recognized his voice almost instantly. It’s great to see him getting more work.
I digress. Going into this, I was worried I wouldn’t get the full effect. If you’ve been here long enough, you know I’m deaf in my left ear. But the sound design in this film is so extraordinary that it hardly mattered.
Undertone is essentially built as an auditory horror experience, almost like a “found audio” movie. Writer-director Ian Tuason designed the soundscape so everything is directional, mimicking the way Evy listens to the recordings through her headphones. Even when you close your eyes, you can feel where everything is or where it might be. The scariest part is how much the film relies on your own imagination. Half the terror is what you think you’re hearing.
The film follows paranormal podcaster Evy Babic (Kiri), who begins receiving disturbing audio files while caring for her comatose mother in her childhood home. Late at night, illuminated only by her laptop, she and her remote co-host Justin (DiMarco) analyze recordings documenting a pregnant couple experiencing something deeply sinister in their home. As Evy’s life begins to unravel—her mother dying upstairs and personal demons surfacing—the horror from the recordings begins bleeding into her real world.
Shot inside Tuason’s actual childhood home in Toronto and inspired by his own caregiving experience while his parents were dying, the film feels intensely intimate. That intimacy makes the horror more suffocating, as that personal history hangs over the entire movie. Beneath the supernatural horror is something much more human: the dread of caring for a dying parent and the strange, lonely limbo that comes with it.
Courtesy of A24
The whole thing feels off-kilter and sonically invasive in a rare way. Undertone leans into parts of filmmaking that are often underutilized, especially sound, and makes it the primary engine of fear. It’s such an interesting form of storytelling.
It’s also a total slow burn in every sense of the word, but that restraint actually works in its favor. The film operates on very low visual stimulation, which only heightens the auditory component and makes every noise feel sharper and more threatening. Twenty minutes in, I was already terrified—not because something huge had happened yet, but because the tension just keeps tightening.
Courtesy of A24
By the time the film reaches its final stretch, you’re already so deep inside Evy’s head that there’s nowhere left to hide.
And fair warning: the final sequence of this film might genuinely be the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen in a theater.
When it ended, the silence in the room felt just as terrifying.
