Undertone (15)

Evangeline Babic, known affectionately to friends as Evy, cares for her comatose mother in the family home. At around 3am, she records episodes of The Undertone podcast with her good friend Justin, who is based in London. For the latest instalment of the show, Evy and Justin listen to a series of 10 recordings emailed anonymously by one of the listeners. These audio files weave a tangled tale of lovebirds Mike and Jessa, who set out to prove that she talks in her sleep by recording themselves.

LondonNet Film Review

Undertone (15) Film Review from LondonNet

Some of the most memorable moments in cinematic horror send chills down the spine because of what you hear. The shrill, staccato violins of Bernard Herrmann’s score as a knife repeatedly descends towards Marion Crane in Psycho; the low-pitched guttural death rattle heralding the approach of ghost Kayako in The Grudge; the increasing tempo of motion tracker beeps in Aliens as acid-blooded predators prepare to swarm. Written and directed by Ian Tuason, Undertone attempts to replicate the goosebump-inducing immersion of found audio, popular in the podcast space, with sonic scares on the big screen…

Evangeline Babic (Nina Kiri), known affectionately to friends as Evy, cares for her comatose mother (Michele Duquet) in the family home. At around 3am, she records episodes of The Undertone podcast with her good friend Justin (voiced by Adam DiMarco), who is based in London. The time difference between self-declared “in-house sceptic” Evy and her believer co-host accounts for the ungodly time that Evy dons noise-cancelling headphones in her mother’s darkened living room to record her part of the conversation. For the latest instalment of the show, Evy and Justin listen to a series of 10 recordings emailed anonymously by one of the listeners.

These audio files weave a tangled tale of lovebirds Mike (Jeff Yung) and Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas), who set out to prove that she talks in her sleep by recording themselves at night. Mike discovers Jessa’s nocturnal mutterings could be cause for concern and as Evy and Justin listen to successive files, they hear references to a female demon named Abyzou rooted in European folklore. The spookiness of Mike and Jeffa’s shared experience bleeds into Evy and Justin’s lives.

Shot in writer-director Tuason’s childhood residence in Rexdale, Toronto, Undertone is a fascinating exercise in sensorial stimulation that didn’t work for me. I’m usually a shamefaced scaredy-pants with anything that goes bump in the night on the big screen but I found this deep dive into the macabre origins of children’s nursery rhymes Baa Baa Black Sheep and London Bridge Is Falling Down to be oddly soothing and soporific rather than skin-prickling or scary.

Some of Evy’s choices are baffling. She leaves her sleeping mother alone in the house overnight and when she returns the next morning, her first thought isn’t to check on the terminally-ill parent who has consumed every waking moment. Instead, she heads to the kitchen to switch on the kettle and casually graze on breakfast cereal, unnecessarily delaying a big reveal in her mother’s bedroom. Kiri works hard to sell her embattled heroine’s escalating fear but the absence of jump scares (or an aural equivalent) can only strain nerves so far. Sounds like a great idea that falls short in execution.

– Kim Hu