[COLUMN] Undertone Is a Solid Horror About a Killer Podcast | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains some basic plot spoilers for the new horror film undertone. It does not spoil the ending, but just to be aware of that. If you’re looking for a quick review: undertone is solid. Mileage may vary depending on one’s tolerance for high-concept “art horror”, and the film really clumsily hammers some broad themes it doesn’t actually seem too interested in exploring, but it is very well made and is genuinely unsettling in its stillness and silence. Not to spoil the essay below, but it’s more interesting in what it doesn’t say than in what it does. Hope you’re still hear.

In Ian Tuason’s undertone, host Justin (Adam DiMarco) signs off every episode of the eponymous paranormal podcast with the warning to listeners, “Don’t be afraid of the dark. Be afraid of the silence.” undertone is most interesting and most unsettling in its moments of silence.

The film is largely centered around a young woman named Evy (Nina Kiri), who is providing palliative care from her dying mother (Michèle Duquet). She has moved out of the apartment that she shared with her boyfriend Darren (Ryan Turner) and back into the family home. Since her mother is no longer able to communicate, the only point of human connection that Evy has is through her podcast co-host Justin, who records remotely at 3am from his new home in London.

Distributed by A24, undertone is recognizable as part of the movement somewhat derisively described as “elevated horror”, but perhaps more accurately identified as “metaphorror.” It is a horror movie that is largely built around atmosphere and mood, with the central supernatural threat serving as a displaced anxiety over the film’s core thematic concerns which are clearly and repeatedly identified within the text itself.

The text itself is perhaps the least interesting way to think about undertone. Textually, this is a film about motherhood. Evy is caring for her dying mother, and at the same time discovers that she is pregnant with a child that she is not sure she wants to have. Evy remembers praying Hail Mary with her mother, and the supernatural investigation that takes focus over the course of the movie involves the demon Abyzou, a real mythic figure associated with “miscarriages and infant mortality.”

This is a familiar theme in both contemporary horror in particular and contemporary film in general. This awards season, for example, saw the release of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, all movies expressing anxiety over motherhood. This has been a recurring fixation in contemporary horror cinema, from Immaculate to The First Omen to Apartment 7A, arguably dating as far back as to The Babadook.

It is not hard to figure out why this theme is bubbling through so much contemporary culture, and why it finds an outlet in horror movies. Women’s rights – including their reproductive rights – are under siege. There has been a backlash to movements like #metoo, which were intended to grant women autonomy and agency. More broadly, there is a growing anxiety about what it means to bring a child into a chaotic world that feels less stable day by day. All of that is reflected in these films.

The biggest issue with undertone is that this is all well-trodden ground at this point, and the film does not necessarily have anything particularly interesting to say about maternal anxieties. There is something interesting in the film’s fixation upon Christian imagery and iconography, and how that informs this commentary and these dynamics, but it feels very familiar. Multiple other films have interrogated this idea in more thorough and more compelling ways.

The most interesting aspects of undertone are tied to its form. The film is more of a showcase for Tuason as a director than a writer, and many of its best ideas are articulated visually and aurally rather than through exposition or backstory. undertone is a horror movie about a podcast. While it may not entirely understand how podcasts work – “trace that call!” Evy orders Justin at the climax – it does capture something of the eeriness and the paradoxes of this new media.

Throughout the film, Tuason frames his shots to emphasize Evy’s isolation. Evy and her mother are the only two characters to appear on screen. Justin is the second lead of the film, and he is heard as a disembodied voice. Darren is only heard on the phone. This is not a narrative conceit. Evy leaves the house at one point to attend a party, Tuason just doesn’t show it. At one point, a palliative care nurse (Marisol D'Andrea) visits the home to talk to Evy, but she is kept entirely off-screen.

The effect of this is to create a sense of Evy’s loneliness in the midst of this crisis. Working with production designer Mercedes Coyle and cinematographer Graham Beasley, Tuason does an excellent job creating a sense of place within the house. The living areas are small enough, but there are plenty of mirrors and reflective surfaces, and many of the rooms are separated by French doors, glass panes making it possible to see from one room into another.

Throughout the film, Tauson positions the camera to emphasize Evy’s loneliness in this empty space. The house is paradoxically both claustrophobic in the tight dimensions of the individual rooms and how close they are all connected – the film has a clear sense of the internal geography of the house – and expansive because there are all these mirrors and windows that serve to create an expansion of the space into itself. It has a slightly uncanny feeling, particularly given how the film is trapped there.

It’s these contradictions that make undertone so compelling. Jason is Evy’s closest friend, but he now lives on the other side of the planet and they spend most of their time talking “in character” as performative hosts of a podcast for a presumed audience. Darren is Evy’s boyfriend and presumably the father of her child, but he never even visits the house. Evy tries to talk as much as she can to her mother, but is not even sure that the older woman can hear her.

At times, undertone recalls Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ Late Night with the Devil, another movie about the paradoxical intimacy of modern mass media. Although Late Night with the Devil was ostensibly about a classic late night chat show, it felt like a commentary of the pervasive nature of contemporary social media and the way that it infiltrates individual’s lives, breaking down barriers of reality almost like a satanic conjuring ritual.

Podcasts are strange. For most podcasters, they are not traditional media with traditional media infrastructure. They are intimate objects, recordings made in bedrooms and dining rooms, casual conversations between friends that are shared with the world. They are enjoyed by strangers in quiet moments – on walks or commutes or doing the dishes. Just as people fell asleep watching light night television, people fall asleep listening to podcasts. It is a very strange thing to think about.

Tuason captures a lot of this in undertone. The film’s sound mixing is incredible. When Evy puts on her noise-cancelling headphones to record, she completely disconnects from the sound of the physical space that she is in. She is still in that house with her mother, but she’s also in a conversation with Jordan. Repeatedly, Evy reacts to sounds on her headphones as if they are coming from the house, as if these two layers of reality are collapsing into one another.

There is something very effective in the stillness and the voyeurism of Tuason’s camera, which often seems to loom over Evy like a malignant presence or spy on her through doorways. Isn’t that the intimacy of podcasting? Don’t podcasters invite the audience in? At certain points, as one expects in a horror movie, shadows and shapes seem to move within the house around Evy, as if the characters or the monsters from the podcast recording have arrived into her physical space.

Hosts are invited to be more personal than traditional media personalities, to share themselves with an audience around the world that they do not know. However, a podcast is not a conversation, it is a broadcast. Evy is speaking to the world. Allowing for strange emails from anonymous accounts or late-night callers, the world does not really speak back. It is a very strange dynamic, one reflected in how Tuason shoots the film. Evy is completely alone, but also never truly alone.

As one might expect for a movie about a creepy podcast, much of undertone is built around enhancing and analyzing sound files, trying to decode hidden messages buried in files through techniques like backmasking. At times, this obsession evokes something like Rodney Ascher’s Room 237, a documentary about the people picking apart Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, its own portrait of an audience so isolated that they are “left to put the pieces together with whatever tools they have.”

As the podcast’s resident skeptic, Evy dismisses all of this as “audio apophenia”, the human brain’s desire to find meaning in meaninglessness. In a world where people are perhaps starved of human connection, is it any wonder that they start to forge connections of their own? Research has demonstrated that loneliness and social isolation are key indicators in susceptibility to conspiracy theories, the spread of which has been facilitated by the hyperconnected digital internet world.

Roger Ebert famously argued that “a movie is not about what it is about, but about how it is about it.” undertone is a really interesting illustration of this idea. Textually, it is a movie about motherhood, but it is not especially compelling when considered though that lens. Formally, it is a fascinating exploration of isolation and disconnect in the modern digital world, in the paradox of being more closely connected and yet further apart than ever.