by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Nina Kiri, Adam DiMarco, Michèle Duquet
Intro:
… legitimately terrifying to watch.
If you’ve ever heard a sudden stab of orchestral strings accompanying a cheap jump scare, or used The Grudge’s death rattle as a vocal stim, or noticed the low rumbling of sub-bass foreshadowing le scary thing happening in a Paranormal Activity entry, then you have the general idea of how important a sturdy soundscape is for a horror film. And that last example is especially pertinent in the case of Undertone, as just a few months after it made its premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival, writer/director Ian Tuason was announced as entering final negotiations for helming the series’ eighth instalment. Hindsight may be 20/20, but just going by his feature debut here, he might stand a chance of achieving the impossible and making Paranormal Activity watchable again.
The premise and indeed the singular setting of Undertone would have fit right in with the post-COVID iso-horror trend of making an ordinary house into the most daunting place to be stuck in. Focusing on paranormal podcaster Evy (Nina Kiri) as, over the course of recording a new episode, she goes through a mysteriously-emailed set of ten vocal recordings with her co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco), with the film’s grip on the audience defined primarily through its sound mixing. From the sudden quieting of the outside world once the headphones go on, to the overthinking of old nursery rhymes for their supposed bleak subtext, to wondering if the sounds are coming from within those ear cups… or somewhere else in the house, the film’s soundscape layers all kinds of audio fragments and ADR and backmasking to create an enveloping atmosphere. The sound doesn’t so much surround the audience as it besieges you.
But then again, this is cinema, not the latest Big Finish production; what about the visuals? Well, this basically does for horror what The Guilty did for crime thrillers: Lean heavy into the aural side of things, but still deliver sufficient visuals to make the whole package cinema-worthy. The reliance on a singular camera setup from DP Graham Beasley adds to the claustrophobic framing of the story, utilising the occasional Dutch tilt and oscillating-fan motion to provide suitable punctuation to the audio. Some of the imagery can feel a bit obnoxious, like Evy always recording for the podcast during the witching hour (a motif that may strain credibility for those who remember the 3AM challenge craze), but for the most part, it contributes to the tangibly anxious mood of the film.
While the presentation is hands-sweating material, the story is both oblique and generic. As daring as the technical aspects, the reliance on Catholic imagery can make this feel like it’s just a stone’s throw away from the Conjuring series, and feels just as overplayed at this point. The recurring motif of tension between mothers and their children admittedly plays well into Evy’s own character arc, with the depiction of her caring for her bedridden mother (the only other character we physically see on-screen), but by film’s end, it doesn’t really tie together into a grand terrifying idea that would pay off the slow-burn lead-up.
Undertone is an effective and unique kind of horror flick, but likely to dip in personal favour once the credits roll and you start breaking it all down. It runs into a similar issue as Unfriended, where it presents genuinely fresh scares on the big screen (and arguably may even produce greater chills when watched on a laptop screen), but is so beholden to the contemporary cliches of the genre that it feels more like a fancy reheating of leftovers than a whole new recipe. But even with misgivings about its streamlined-to-a-fault narrative and its familiar imagery, it still succeeds at the one thing that, above all else, a horror film has to accomplish: It is legitimately terrifying to watch.
