‘Undertone’ Review: This Pod Means Death in Ian Tuason’s Paranormal Aural Creeper [B+] | Sundance
Probably the most exciting part of low-budget horror filmmaking is that the films tend to latch themselves onto one singular gimmick and take it to extreme, terrifying levels. The found footage subgenre proves this time and time again, starting from the phenomenon that was The Blair Witch Project, and then over the years, we see the subgenre revived in slightly different forms, from home video surveillance in Paranormal Activity to online on-screen meetings like Unfriended.
In the case of Ian Tuason’s directorial debut with Undertone, he taps into something that is far more primal. Instead of focusing on a subgenre or a concept, Tuason explores the medium of audio itself, one of the most crucial aspects in terrorizing a viewer. With a premise centering around a podcaster listening to creepy audio files, Undertone thrives in its simplicity, as it careens to us as this undeniable, exciting new voice in horror.
Our podcaster is Evy (Nina Kiri), who has recently moved home to care for her dying mother (Michèle Duquet). Her mom hasn’t eaten or drank anything for days, and the nurse has already prepped Evy for her mother’s imminent death via a “death rattle” sound she will make. In between taking care of her mother, Evy runs “The Undertone Podcast” with Justin (voiced by Kris Holden-Ried). Each episode sees them listening to a new creepy recording, which is typically sent to them by a listener, and they debate or debunk what they’ve just heard. Justin, being a superstitious believer in old folk tales and the occult, would often lean in on the recordings and try to connect them with real urban myths. Evy, on the other hand, is our devil’s advocate. She wears that skeptic hat with pride, as she turns down practically every theory from Justin.
Things go up a notch when they receive a mysterious email containing ten audio files, which depict a married couple named Mike and Jessa (voiced by Jeff Yung and Keana Lyn Bastidas), who begin to experience… ahem… paranormal activity in their home. What starts off as simply Jessa talking in her sleep soon escalates into something far more disturbing in each succeeding file, as Evy begins to fear that this sinister presence has seeped over to her home.
Undertone is clearly inspired by many other horror stories. The audio recordings Evy and Justin listen to are very much an audio-recorded version of the first Paranormal Activity film, while much of the second act of the film bears similarities to Sinister (Justin even uncovers a demonic connection later on, identifying a figure that’s essentially Bughuul from Sinister). Even the bedroom Evy’s mother is sleeping in is a visual callback to The Exorcist. Evy has to climb a flight of stairs up every time to get to the bedroom, and even the lighting from the lamp has a similar cold blue hue where you can imagine Max von Sydow and Jason Miller squaring off Linda Blair. Through these creative inspirations, Undertone is very familiar in its content. The narrative doesn’t go beyond its hook, resulting in a few beats that are repetitive, if not a bit tedious. The film really goes through all the recordings – as Evy and Justin go from File #1 to #10 one at a time – and even though the recordings themselves progress and intensify well, the script can’t escape having to redo the dynamic of Justin believing in it and Evy dismissing it over and over again each time. It gets to a point where Evy’s rejection of File #3 sounds exactly the same as her dismissal of File #7.
Where Undertone truly excels is in its form, specifically the work of sound designer David Gertsman and cinematographer Graham Beasley for how they create an ultimate immersive experience. Every time Evy puts on her headphones, all sound is sucked out – exactly how it feels when you put on noise-cancelling headphones. As she looks into abnormalities in the audio files, playing them over and over again to see if she hears a subtle voice in the background saying something, the film is chillingly effective in getting the audience to lean in. Much like the best of found footage films, where the footage makes you look really hard to see if something is there, Undertone wants you to listen closely. But Tuason’s sensibilities with the sound go beyond just designing the creepy sound itself, but knowing how to incorporate them with cinematography and where to deploy them in a theatrical setting.
Tuason favors wide shots in moments where we expect close-ups. Multiple times, a shot will linger a few seconds longer than normal. Evy says goodnight to her mother. She turns the lights off. And the shot stays on the mother’s face for just a few seconds too long – enough time for our brains to suspect whether she’s going to move. As Evy listens to the recordings, consisting of chantings and bangs against the wall, the shot itself has Evy occupying only half of the frame, while the other half shows a hallway in her home. Naturally, our eyes keep staring and we imagine if something (or someone) is there in the house, but as the sound effects play, a sharp viewer would start to notice where in the theater the sound is coming from. “I swear those wall bang sounds were coming from the left speaker, but that last one just came out of the speaker on the right.” Combine those kinds of thoughts with camera framing that makes you expect something in the background, you start to wonder whether those sounds are coming from the audio recording Evy’s listening to or if they’re coming from her house.
Perhaps the biggest achievement in Undertone is the way it “conditions” us to start imagining things that may or may not be there. When we’re not sure whether something is actually standing in the dark, and we can’t know for certain whether the sound we’re hearing is just an audio file from a computer or actually happening in our physical space, our minds play tricks on us. Reminiscent of the best urban legends and creepypastas, Undertone knows how to do a lot with very little. The best thing I can say about Tuason as a filmmaker is that he fully understands that the audience is capable of freaking themselves out.
It all builds to a riveting climax in which time and time again, Tuason cuts to black and we can only listen – a smart inversion of our gut reactions to “look away” when the film is too frightening. Here, when there’s nothing to look at, our imagination makes everything worse. Though the film isn’t the sharpest or most original narratively, it’s hard to knock a filmmaker whose goal is to create an immersive soundscape, something that has not been done before to this extent. That the end result feels like something I shouldn’t be listening to in the first place is an achievement in and of itself. As Undertone comes to its (quite literally) spellbinding end, you can’t help but feel like Ian Tuason has just cursed all of us.
Grade: B+
This review is from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival where Undertone had its world premiere. A24 will distribute the film theatrically.
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