Review: UNDERTONE

Evie spends her days tending to her near-comatose mother at home and holding up her half of a podcast of the paranormal (with her as the skeptic). The episode in progress with Justin sounds intriguing: he's been sent ten audio files of sketchy origin. As they go through the files, they start finding anomalies in the audio. Bumps, whispers, phrases in strange languages. This last gets the two chatting about backmasking and they find examples in certain nursery rhymes which leads to the discovery in one of the files of a phrase that might be a key to something very nasty. Against time, they need to find as much about that as possible. Will they make it?

Ian Tuason's feature debut from his own screenplay is a weave of themes and uses remoteness as the spur. This is essential. It means that, in the end, Evie must first accept the supernatural explanation and then fight against its source by herself in small town Canada, with Justin in distant London incapable of helping.

Meantime, we get a lot of convincing of Evie who counters Justin's credulity with reason and doubt. She has to experience in herself. This is done in measured doses and forms a strong thread throughout. She's not easily won over but she is under the greatest threat. The recordings are by a man of his wife to prove to her that she talks in her sleep. A childless couple, the woman starts speaking about saving children and some of the strange utterances she makes are decoded to reveal an ancient spirit intent on causing miscarriages or, though possession, infanticides. In the second act, Evie confirms that she is pregnant. That's as spoilery as I'm going to get. 

This is mostly managed with conventional horror cinema grammar: use of darkness, odds between what audiences see and characters don't. While the direction stays on the right side of bombast (this, thankfully, does not play like the James Wan dross that the trailer promised), this film hangs on performance. Nina Kiri gives us a dynamic young woman who can sublimate her various guilts and stresses behind a self-preserving persona. We get a good indication that she takes great comfort in her rationality. The quiet voice-only performance of Justin (played by Adam DiMarco) serves as a solid counter.

If there are flaws they lie in the use of creaky tropes. The house, clean but shadowy, does not need the exaggerated Dutch tilts to make it more sinister. A counter is a moment in which a light is switched on in an adjoining room. What makes it genuinely eerie is the sound of the switch clicking. It's slight but audible, reminding us that it needs to be thrown by a finger. What we don't need is the trope of chorusing the dialogue of the demonic world with pitched-down voices mixed in. This is as old as The Exorcist. It was, and remains, powerful there. In 2026 it just sounds old hat (not ancient, mind you, just old). All of the instances where a voice is thickened this way would have been a lot more effective as the original voices alone, speaking as normal.

In a film as carefully sound-designed as this (and it is brilliantly worked), you would think that one extra stretch away from conventionality might have suggested itself but, no, it's just the old trick brought out again. This and the events of the very end feel like rushed decisions and I can forgive them in a first timer's movie. I do know that Tuason is slated for the next Paranormal Activity franchise entry and can only hope he brings the better moments of restraint to that. Then again, I know what happened to that franchise. Anyway, let's end on that: hope.

Oh, the concept of a patron saint of cursed women, given as it is here, without irony, is an ignorant nonsense.

Viewing Notes: as all the new horror movies are having tiny cinema airings before being sucked into the void of streaming, I was forced to rent this through an online provider. Happily, the beaufitul UHD image and surround mix came through and it was a pleasure to view.