Written and Directed by Ian Tuason | 94 min | ▲▲
Let’s take a moment to appreciate living in the era of A24. That’s the wildly successful independent American film studio committed to auteur cinema and funding new and idiosyncratic talent. They are the kings of big swings, and while they occasionally whiff — How To Make A Killing and Death of A Unicorn to name a couple from the past year — their record for interesting, challenging movies is phenomenal. Consider they’ve put out some of the very best movies of the past 13 years: Under The Skin, Ex Machina, and Past Lives, or how about just a few gems from in the past 12 months — Friendship, Materialists, Sorry Baby, Highest 2 Lowest, Eternity, Marty Supreme, and Pillion.
That kind of risk-taking doesn’t always pay off, and I’m sorry to report that’s what’s happening here, especially since this comes from a Canadian filmmaker.
I’ll give credit where it’s due: Undertone is a horror that trades on the sound of things that go bump in the night with a lot of ambition, especially impressive given the shoestring budget this must have been made on. This is a single location movie, with only one character on screen who speaks, Evy (the capable Nina Kiri). She’s the caregiver for her mother (Michèle Duquet) who is dying in a room upstairs and does nothing but sleep and defecate in her bed.
Evy rarely goes out, and never looks out a window. We never see the exterior of the house, or anything else beyond a couple of rooms and hallways. The filmmakers do their best to ratchet up the claustrophobia with deep shadows, odd noises and flickering lights, but this place never escapes the feeling of being a stage, a set.
Evy co-hosts a paranormal podcast with her friend, Justin (Adam DiMarco), who lives in London. They record in the middle of the night her time, which is around dawn his time — it’s a little unclear why they have to do it at these inconvenient hours.
Justin has been sent 10 sound files, which he claims are from a couple that recorded themselves sleeping in order for the husband to prove to the wife that she talks in her sleep, but the recordings also feature possible evidence of an actual demonic possession.
Justin plays the role of the believer in the podcast, while Evy is the skeptic. Unfortunately, the movie makes us all skeptics. The recordings of the couple are so poorly staged I figured they were a hoax all along. As someone who works with sound every day, what we hear is utterly unconvincing — characters move around and we get all kinds of aural details that just doesn’t seem plausible from a sound recording standpoint, let alone something supernatural. What makes matters worse are waves of hokey, forced dialogue between the characters that don’t ring true.
In the meantime, Evy starts to learn about a demon who preys on pregnant mothers — Evy’s pregnant, ‘natch — and she starts to explore the possibility of demonic forces revealing themselves in children’s songs and rhymes when you play them backward. That idea was lame back in the 1980s when Led Zeppelin got grief due to the supposed satanic lyrics that were revealed when you played “Stairway To Heaven” in reverse. There’s not much here that’s new, or that hasn’t been done better elsewhere.
By the time Undertone resolves with some visual scares go along with the audio, it ends up a collection of creepy sounds, ye olde demonic voices, and an effort to channel The Blair Witch Project to minor effect. There are some interesting ideas here and a compelling central performance, but the film is hamstrung by its production limitations and lack of genuine originality.
