Ian Tuason’s undertone takes a whole new approach to horror by focusing on sound over everything else, for better or worse. The film is heading to Blu-ray and 4K in October. 2026 is the year of horror movies. Not only have we already had films like They Will Kill You, Ready Or Not 2: Here ... undertone review | Podcasting made scary
Ian Tuason’s undertone takes a whole new approach to horror by focusing on sound over everything else, for better or worse. The film is heading to Blu-ray and 4K in October.
2026 is the year of horror movies. Not only have we already had films like They Will Kill You, Ready Or Not 2: Here I Comeand 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, we still have films like Hokum, Resident Evil and Backrooms to look forward to.
Hitting cinemas next is Ian Tuason’s undertone. The film made quite the impression last year at Fantasia International Film Fest and A24 quickly nabbed the distribution rights to it in the US, immediately giving it a shiny glow.
undertone, which runs for an economical 93 minutes, is set in one house and one house only. Nina Kiri’s Evy looks after her dementia-ridden mother and is the co-host of the paranormal podcast The Undertone with her best friend Justin. Evy provides the more sceptic viewpoint while Justin is the believer of the pair. Things get a little weird and spooky after the pair receive an email with ten recordings attached and as they listen to them one by one.
It’s a pretty classic, unsurprising set-up, albeit a very specific one. What Tuason does to elevate it is to fully focus on the sound. As Evy puts on her headphones, the film – and us! – is swallowed by this heavy silence, the same kind that comes with noise-cancelling headphones in real life.
It’s immersive for sure and for the most part, undertone feels scary. It doesn’t offer anything particularly new or exciting in terms of individual scares or story, but it is enough to give you goosebumps on a good few occasions and some of the film’s themes will potentially dig under your skin.
It’s not just undertone that has used sound to effectively scare the living heck out of its audiences. In fact, sound is one of the key elements in making your film truly scary. Gaspar Noe famously used a low-frequency tone to get his audience to feel even more uncomfortable while watching Irreversible and James Wan used low frequency sound in 2007’s Dead Silence and also put particular effort into the sound design of The Conjuring 2.
Nina Kiri is mostly on screen alone and it’s her job to carry the film. Justin is just a voice on the headphones and Evy’s Mama, played by Michèle Duquet, is mostly a silent present, looming in the background. It’s a lot for one actress to carry a whole film, but Kiri succeeds impressively and we experience genuine fear through her.
Here’s the issue though: will it work at home? undertone is best when experienced from a large cinema screen with lots of people, but it’s hard to see it offer much at home, on a Wednesday night after work, on my 42 inch TV, terrible sound and bagged popcorn.
The story offers very few surprises, but the film’s religious themes add a nice touch. Tuason also uses negative space to keep us guessing where the next scare might come from, but undertone might prove to be a bit too subtle for some and undertone is often more impressive than it is scary. The scares, which are undeniably effective, start to repeat themselves soon enough and there’s just not quite enough meat around the film’s bones.
Tuason will next work on the new Paranormal Activity movie. The first film, released in 2006, was rumored to have used an infrared frequency sound to create its deeply disturbing atmosphere so Tuason seems like a smart choice to lead these movies back into the spotlight. Perhaps the combination of immersive sound and extensive lore is what Tuason needs for his next project to be a homerun.
UNDERTONE is now available digitally and on Blu-ray and 4K on 26th October.
