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Hello and welcome to Geeks of Color, the online community that highlights diversity in the world of geeks. If you’re a longtime fan, welcome back, and if you’re new, please don’t forget to like, subscribe, and rate the podcast website five stars. I’m your host, Matt Fernandez, and today, we’re diving into the latest A24 horror film, Undertone.
Podcasts are a major part of my life. I’ve founded/produced/edited/hosted/guest-hosted on nine different podcasts since 2019, including my own horror podcast (that I really need to get back to if I can stop being lazy). I’ve slowly replaced listening to music with listening to podcasts, usually shows about horror, food studies or pop culture deep dives. I even once wrote a short film about an evil podcast. So when I learned about a new film about a podcast that gets haunted, I knew I had to see it.
Director Ian Tuason’s feature film debut, Undertone, centers on Evy (Nina Kiri), a young woman who spends her days caring for her comatose, dying mother (Michèle Duquet) and her nights recording her paranormal podcast, “The Undertone,” with her remote co-host, Justin (Adam DiMarco). When the podcast receives a mysterious email containing 10 audio files, Evy and Mike record themselves listening to them for their next episode. As the files become more disturbing and Evy’s mother starts exhibiting strange behaviors, the podcasters realize they’ve stumbled upon more than they bargained for.
Undertone nails it when it comes to podcasting authenticity. The microphone. The soundproof headphones. The Focusrite Scarlett audio interface. Late-night recording sessions. Co-host small talk and banter. Searching for things on the internet as you’re talking about them. It’s all so real and relatable, things I own or do every week. Everyone loves to make fun of a podcaster, but with Evy, Tuason has created the most loving cinematic portrait of a podcaster yet, miles better than whatever garbage Ghostbusters: Afterlife or Legendary’s Godzilla vs Kong series would have you believe. The only thing missing was a scene of Evy forgetting to unmute her mic.
As a primarily audio-focused medium, you would hope that a film about a podcast would feature masterful sound design, and thankfully, Undertone succeeds. From the crispness of Evy and Justin’s voices to the staticky, cluttered mystery recordings to the sudden silence when she puts on her headphones to the eerie raggedness of her mother’s breathing, every little detail seems to have been accounted for and designed to perfection. From one sound designer to another, I tip my proverbial hat to the entire sound department.
I just finished playing last year’s Silent Hill, and as I’m playing through the newly released Resident Evil Requiem, I’ve found that what you hear is often much scarier than what you can see. The real terror is in the mind, the nightmares lurking just off-screen. The audio recordings are a highly effective way to tap into this phenomenon, setting the stage with sound effects and dialogue, then relying on the audience’s imagination to fill in the horror.
The interplay of sound and image is also fundamental to the film’s effectiveness. While Catholic religious iconography is, on its own, very creepy, combining it with haunting music or mysterious recordings creates an auditoryKuleshov Effect and imbues what is normally associated with hope and peace with a sinister discomfort instead. The long, lingering shots and slow camera pans are underscored by the audio, building dread. Thematically, I loved how Undertone was able to use religious imagery and nursery rhymes, common sources of comfort, and subvert them to be secret sources of evil.
Unfortunately, Undertone is much less of a treat for the eyes than it is for the ears. Those lingering shots full of tension that I mentioned? Most of the time, the payoff doesn’t come. In terms of visual scares, the movie is frightfully scarce. There are maybe four scenes in total that actually had something creepy happening on screen, and even then, the action was happening in the background. I found myself not even focusing on Evy and instead furiously scouring every scene for hidden horrors that simply did not exist. Undertone hoards its biggest visuals until the end, leading to a finale that undercuts itself and feels rushed. The irony is that this movie about a podcast might have been better served if it had just been a podcast itself.
I felt uneasy and creeped out through the film, pretty much until the end, where, as I said, the sudden barrage of noise and imagery makes it hard to absorb anything, much less be scared by it. In terms of atmosphere and build-up, Tuason did his job. In terms of actually being scary, there was a lot of missed opportunity.
It’s often hard to find the right balance of character development and backstory, but Undertone does very little. We’re told that Evy is the skeptical half of the podcast, while Justin is the more impressionable believer. We understand that she feels guilty about her mother and that, since moving in to take care of her, Evy has not seen her boyfriend in a long time. We’re supposed to believe that Evy’s dying and comatose mother, who hasn’t eaten in days, is walking around the house and turning on faucets and lights, yet is always neatly tucked in bed when Evy comes to check on her.
Undertone is a surprisingly lean movie, taking place entirely in Evy’s home and featuring only her and her mother on screen. The rest of the characters are simply voices she hears on the phone, on recordings, or from Justin when she’s working on the podcast with him. That leanness helps keep the pace moving forward, but it also leaves the plot feeling very bare-bones and requiring a heavy suspension of disbelief.
What does Evy do for a living that can support both herself and her mother? Despite being popular enough to get fan mail (lucky… no, I’m not jealous at all…), I highly doubt “The Undertone” generates enough revenue split between her and Justin to pay the mortgage and the medical bills. How does Evy know how to perfectly spell the names of obscure saints and demons that she’s never heard of? How does the duo ever get any episodes published when they record for maybe ten minutes at a time, then pause for a couple of days when Evy gets tired or feels bad, before recording for another ten minutes? How is Justin somehow able to understand the secret messages hidden in songs with perfect clarity the very first time he hears them?
It’s all too convenient. It all happens too quickly. It all feels unearned. The cast does a fairly decent job, especially Kiri and DiMarco. Kiri carries the film on her shoulders and portrays Evy’s skepticism and subtle guilt particularly well. But, like many podcasts that for some reason decide they need a video component, there’s not much happening on screen besides her talking into a microphone, and I found myself scouring the scenery instead of watching the podcast host. There’s just not enough reason for me to care.
Undertone is a film that should have been rated PG-13. The scares, themes and story were all fairly mild. That’s not to knock PG-13 horror films, which are often fantastic, but to say that aside from a few instances of the F-word, there was nothing that warranted an R rating. It feels like the swearing was included just to get the R and make people think the film was scarier than it is, thus driving audience interest and ticket sales.
I love listening to and making podcasts, and I wanted to love Undertone. It made me feel uncomfortable, but overall, its premise feels wasted on a story and characters that wanted more development and scares that should have played to both your eyes and your ears. Honestly, the scariest part of watching the movie was when the recliner seat next to me malfunctioned and unexpectedly shook all the seats in our row.
So that wraps it up for this review on Geeks of Color. While I liked many aspects of Undertone, and I might watch it one more time to catch some details I may have missed, it fell short of my expectations. I’m not mad that I saw it, but it didn’t make me want to subscribe or wait for the next episode.
Join us next time, when I either review another film or interview someone famous.
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Rating: 6/10