Sound. It’s the vital component of any horror film experience. Without it we have no ability to build ambience, stoke up dread or even deliver nerve jangling jumps scares. Imagine Eraserhead without the ever present industrial rumble; The Blair Witch Project without those baby screams coming from the woods or even the stinging satisfaction of a dead, ominous silence suddenly being broken by a loud noise to nerve jangling effect.
It’s a detail that’s potentially well known by Ian Tuason, who has hinged his entire debut feature film, Undertone, about the hearing and deciphering of various freakish sounds and it’s effect it gas on the living.
But in a time where horror has scored Oscar glory for being rather robust and confrontational, is A24 on the right track by steering back into the world of minimalist chills that mostly spring from your overstimulated imagination?
Evangeline “Evy” Babic hosts a horror podcast in which she plays the sceptic to her co-host and friend, Justin, who seems to believe everything they cover on their show. Recently, Evy has had a lot on her plate due to having to provide care for her comtose mother who may be only days away from death. Raised Catholic, the podcaster carries around a substantial amount of guilt about her situation, but in an attempt to blow off some steam, she preps for the latest episode of The Undertone, but Justin contacts Evy to let her know that he has something special in store this week.
It seems that Justin has been sent an anonymous email that contains a random string of letters and ten mysterious audio files which he plans to play on the podcast while the two debate it. Pleased for the challenge, Evy agrees and as they work their way through the first couple of files, it seems that they were recorded by a young, expecting couple named Mike and Jessa, who seemingly started recording themselves at night because Jessa was starting to talk in her sleep. However, taking in your sleep is one thing, but dreamily crooning “London Bridge Is Falling Down” at three in the morning tends to set off a couple of alarm bells.
As Evy and Justin continue recording the episode while working through the progressively more sinister audio files, the stress of caring for her mother and hearing Mike and Jenna’s night terrors get more and more extreme starts to work away at Evy’s sense of self. Worse yet, this so-called skeptic feels a certain unease growing as she waits for her mother to finally pass on. But after going on a deep dive online that sees her research various nursery rhymes and subliminal messages discovered once you play them backward, it seems that some sort of malevolent force could be at work. But who, or what is Abyzou, and what does it have against women who are with child…?
Now this is what I call a corrupted audio file…
I mentioned The Blair Witch Project in my opening, and if I’m being as transparent as I can be, it’s actually a very good yardstick for measuring how much you’ll get out of Ian Tuason’s ominous dreadfest. As most of us should know, the 1999 classic spun it’s web by giving us the most uneven game of show and tell in cinema history. Utterly dedicated to piling on the unseen chills, we never saw what lurked in the woods, never got an adequate explanation about what was actually happening and was dumped back outside theatres, blinking in the daylight, wondering just what the fuck just happened. It seems to be the exact same result that Tuason is shooting for as he prioritises paranoia and a rising sense of doom as a couple of half-assed explorers of the unknown bite off way more than they can chew. In fact, there’s also a fair few comparisons to be made with Scott Derrickson’s Sinister, that also saw a horror voyeur fall ass backwards into an ancient evil that likes using more modern technology.
However, if you’re a horror fan who doesn’t have the patience or imagination to weather a movie that has no intention of giving you the release of a jump scare, monster reveal, or even some handy exposition to help you process, you might as well do yourself a favour and not bother, because you’re only going to annoy everyone when you loudly declare Undertone to be underwhelming.
However, with a modicum of patience and a kick ass sound system, Undertone actually proves to be something of a genuinely unnerving experience chiefly because of how good a grasp it’s director has on the medium of sound.
Be it an oppressive click of a ticking clock, to the shrouding out of the outside world whenever Evy puts her headphones on, the key to the film is the intricate map of audio work that evokes a modern take on Robert Wise’s The Haunting – especially once all the banging and backwards nursery rhymes start kicking in.
However, Tuason doesn’t just rely on scary sounds and atmospheric surroundsound to carry the full weight as he also does some interesting things with his camera too. Focusing on filling the frame with empty space to indicate that some invisible force is in the room pulling focus, the minimal cast is frequently relegated to only occupying a fraction of the frame as our paranoid eyeballs scan the emptiness for anything lurking just out of view.
However, when it comes to the actual story and characters, Undertone falls back on a few familiar tropes that are typically found in A24 fare. To heighten Evy’s (a solid Nina Kiri) disorientation, the subplot of her dying, religious mother already has her on the wrong foot before that audio file ever comes her way and the film flirts heavily with “hag horror” as we wait for the comatose old lady to do something horrible. Similarly, the only other human we see onscreen is Evy herself, with everyone else reduced to disembodied voices coming through her headphones and the film dies a great job of allowing your imagination to run wild, especially when Tuason focused on shots of bits Evy’s house that relate what’s going on on the files to really connect the fear.
Those a bit more long in the tooth when it comes to this sort of thing may find some of the more visual tricks a bit overfamiliar. There’s creepy statuettes that won’t stay put away; andom crayon scrawlings join to make a bigger picture; sounds of babies crying are liberally deployed and we even get that old chestnut of kids doodles suddenly appearing on the walls when shit gets really serious.
If for some reason you prefer you horror more in your face, or you’re planning to make the huge mistake of watching this on a tablet, or have your phone out during the runtime, Undertone simply will not work as it needs absolute focus (and some muscular speakers) for its charms to truly creep under your skin. However, if you’re receptive to the experience, the wall of eerie sounds and isolation should stoke up sizable amounts of tension as the next episode of the podcast isn’t the only thing that’s going to get dropped…
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