Nina Kiri in Undertone.DUSTIN RABIN/VVS
Undertone
Written and directed by Ian Tuason
Starring Nina Kiri, Adam DiMarco and Michele Duquet
Classification 14A; 94 minutes
Opens in theatres March 13
In space, no one can hear you scream. But what if you’re trapped inside a podcast studio?
That is the proposition, more or less, of the new Canadian supernatural thriller Undertone. It’s arriving in theatres this weekend with more fanfare than the usual homegrown horror flick thanks to the imprimatur of cool-kid indie distributor A24, which picked up the film’s rights outside Canada after its premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival this past summer. But while writer-director Ian Tuason’s feature debut boasts an eyebrow-raising – or rather, ear-twitching – concept, the movie never quite manages to turn up the volume loud enough to drown out the skeptics.
Set entirely inside the childhood home of Evy (Nina Kiri), a podcaster who is caring for her dying mother (Michele Duquet), Undertone plays like a Spotify-sponsored update on an old-fashioned radio play. Instead of splashing the screen with gore, Tuason tries to find his own particular wavelength of terror in the jump scares of shouts and murmurs. The source of all the aural angst is a series of cryptic recordings that Evy and her heard-but-unseen friend Justin (The White Lotus’s Adam DiMarco) analyze for their popular paranormal podcast, The Undertone, which the pair records every night at 3 a.m., while Evy’s mother slowly expires in her bedroom upstairs.
To put the pair’s podcast in X-Files terms, Evy is the Scully-like skeptic while Justin is the Mulder-y believer, with the pair also harbouring some conflicted romantic desires. But after Justin is emailed a handful of audio files from an anonymous source – the recordings chronicle the gradual mental breakdown of a young couple – the friends find themselves egging each other on to jump deeper into the rabbit hole, with predictably horrifying results. Evidently, neither paranormal expert has ever watched The Ring or One Missed Call.
Kiri in Undertone.DUSTIN RABIN/VVS
The twists and turns that follow are revealed all too gradually, to the point that Tuason’s drip-drip-drip approach to terror is enough to approximate water torture, and not in the good horror-movie kind of way. Through it all, though, Kiri keeps the shenanigans centred and believable, with the Serbian-Canadian actress giving off the energy of an early Scream-era Neve Campbell crossed with the indefatigable energy of Anna Kendrick.
Indeed, the film works best when it is only Evy and her headphones on the screen, the character’s head (and ours) becoming overwhelmed by some truly impressive, singularly creepy sound design. It is only when Tuason frequently strays from the sound and fury of it all that the movie loses its death grip. While the background knowledge that the director filmed the movie inside his own childhood home in the Toronto neighbourhood of Rexdale adds some intriguing therapeutic context, there are only so many shots of household religious iconography (paintings, statuettes, candles) that you can take before the ostensibly unsettling effect diminishes.
Between Undertone and the 2022 sensation Skinamarink, though, we’re building a solid Canadian subgenre of films exploring childhood homes that are in fact hellscapes. Maybe someone should start a podcast about it.
DUSTIN RABIN/VVS