You knew this was coming: a horror movie about making a podcast. Horror movies do rely on sound more than most other genres, and it is a tantalizing challenge to use a visual medium to comment on a new medium that is so intensely aural. undertone does not meet that challenge in the end, but it is fascinating to watch it try. At any rate, it’s a found-footage horror flick where the footage is all audio, which makes it a different experience than most horror films.
Nina Kiri portrays Evangeline Babić, the host of a podcast called The Undertone, in which she and her co-host Justin (voiced by Adam DiMarco) dissect audio footage of possibly supernatural phenomena. She is recording the latest episode from her mother’s home, where her terminally ill mom (Michèle Duquet) is lying upstairs in a vegetative state. Maybe Evy’s just highly suggestible, all alone in a house where there are framed Bible verses on every wall and recording with Justin in the wee hours of the morning because he’s in Europe. Then again, maybe there actually is something in the house with her.
I can’t say enough about the sound design in this movie. The new episode of The Undertone concerns a mysterious email sent to Justin containing 10 audio files appearing to depict a man named Mike (voiced by Jeff Yung) recording his girlfriend Jessa (voiced by Keana Lyn Bastidas) at night to prove that she talks in her sleep. As she listens along with Justin while they’re recording, Evy becomes uncertain as to whether the noises she hears are on the files or actually in the house. Regardless of where they come from, they are plenty unsettling, as Jessa babbles with such intensity that Mike is audibly frightened. The files also contain unexplained sounds of a baby crying as well as kids singing children’s songs. All this will have maximum impact if you see this movie in a theater with good speakers.
First-time filmmaker Ian Tuason is a podcaster, and he filmed this movie in his own childhood home in Toronto, where, like Evy, he recorded new episodes of his pod in the dining room downstairs while caring for his dying parents. Unfortunately, the emotionally fraught setting comes to curiously little. Tuason is overly fond of panning the camera to empty, darkened places in the house while Evy is recording. While the trick is effective on the few occasions when it actually reveals something to see, he resorts to it too many times.
I kept expecting Evy’s ethnic heritage to come into play (like the actress portraying her, she is of Serbian descent), but it doesn’t. Over the course of the story, she discovers that she is pregnant much like Jessa, and that thematic note fails to add much to the proceedings. Tuason doesn’t explore the theory that Evy floats that the audio files are fakes created by hoaxers — after all, audio footage is easier to stage than video. Too late he introduces the idea that Justin is being stalked as well across the Atlantic. Like the videotape in The Ring, the audio files of Mike and Jessa are designed to bring death to anyone who listens to them all the way through, and because it takes our podcast hosts the entire movie to do that, the movie loses a good bit of tension. All told, Peter Strickland’s 2012 film Berberian Sound Studio does better at creating fear primarily out of sound.
However, if undertone is another horror movie that’s all atmosphere, that atmosphere is pretty good for much of the time. With the help of a fine performance by Kiri, Tuason squeezes a great deal more out of his concept than one would expect. It stands to reason that there will be more movies about podcasts, so it’s good to have this movie that shows what cinema can do with it. Someone inspired by this will eventually do something better, I reckon.
undertone
Starring Nina Kiri and Michèle Duquet. Written and directed by Ian Tuason. Rated R.
