Isolation, paranoia, guilt, and silence are a recipe for unholy terror in Undertone, a thriller that asks its audience to look and listen closely for the clues hidden in the quiet and the dark.
Premiering in the midnight section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Ian Tuason’s impressive directorial debut adjusts itself to a sinister frequency and then slowly dials up the malevolence, in the process leaving reason and lucidity behind. A medley of fears, anxieties, and regrets that repeatedly messes with the senses, it exists at the nexus of sanity and madness, life and death, Heaven and Hell, and sound and image.
Evy (Nina Kiri) has moved back home to care for her dying mother (Michèle Duquet), with whom she lives in a house decorated with Christian iconography. Undertone (in theaters Mar. 13) never mentions Evy’s own faith, yet it’s fair to assume she’s no zealot, given that she hosts a podcast about the paranormal with her long-distance friend Justin (The White Lotus’ Adam DiMarco) in which she plays the skeptic to his true believer.
On their show “The Undertone,” the pair investigate the strange and the supernatural, and it serves as something of an escape for Evy, whose upsetting life—alone with her unresponsive mother, who lies motionless in an upstairs bed, eyes closed and breathing heavily—drops away when she puts on her noise-cancelling headphones.
Pre-tape chitchat between Evy and Justin reveals that she’s in a less-than-satisfying relationship with a guy named Darren (Ryan Turner)—and eager for this end-of-life nightmare to end. On tap for their current episode is an anonymous email that Justin received, subject line “LOL,” reads “Atonement at Tenet,” and has 10 audio file attachments. On them, a man named Mike (Jeff Yung) records his partner Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas) slumbering in order to prove that she talks in her sleep, and in the initial file, fast-forwarding to the four-hour mark verifies Mike’s claim, as Jessa can be heard singing “London Bridge Is Falling Down.”
Evy’s story takes place exclusively in her childhood abode, and Tuason’s camera gazes at her as she listens to these recordings from various angles that highlight the black, empty spaces behind her, be it the staircase on the other side of a wall or the kitchen visible through a door’s window. As with its scratchy, distorted, and context-free audio, the film’s expertly composed imagery encourages active, intense engagement and, in doing so, creates an atmosphere of slowly dawning dread. Undertone is steeped in the unknown—and the desire to decipher it—and with the second recording, in which “London Bridge Is Falling Down” plays in reverse, Justin states that he hears a message in the mix: “Mike kill all.”
That’s not totally audible to us or to Evy, but it initiates an inquiry into the secret, sinister meanings of nursery rhymes, which were often about children suffering harm at the hands of adults, thereby serving as cautionary tales for the young and impressionable. The fraught relationship between parents and kids is at the epicenter of Undertone, and the director punctuates his mood of repressed unhappiness and unease with jarring sonic blasts and inexplicable occurrences, the first of which is Evy’s mom’s bedside lamp turning on in the middle of the night—a sign, to Evy, that perhaps the woman isn’t as perpetually immobile and out of it as she appears.
Only once does Evy leave the premises, and before she departs, she discovers that her mother has defecated in bed and must be cleaned. The misery of the slow march to death colors the film, and compounding matters are a host of bizarre incidents, such as Evy returning from her nocturnal outing—to a party thrown by Darren, who convinces her to take a temporary break from her caregiving—to find her mom lying face down on the floor of her room. On the phone with a nurse, Evy reports that her mother isn’t eating, and asks how she’ll know when it’s the end, to which she’s told that the surest sign is the sound of the “death rattle.”
The mundane and the macabre comingle in Undertone, and as the two press on with their examination, Evy’s experiences begin to echo the mysterious audio files’ actions, from a sink faucet running bizarrely to loud bumps reverberating through the house.
Whether this is real or not is a question Evy can’t answer, as her grasp on reality slowly begins to weaken. Her haunted visage becomes wracked by a lethal combination of confusion, exhaustion, and horror, and ghostly voices echo in the young woman’s headphones, including a saved voicemail from her mom in which she’s told “I’m praying for you,” and the homemade recordings of Mike and Jessa, whose ordeal Justin eventually suspects is the byproduct of demonic possession.
Undertone gradually loses itself in a swirl of shadowy figures barely visible in the gloom, incomprehensible words repeated ad nauseam, and discussions about a malicious entity that preys upon children—a relevant topic considering that the only two characters seen on-screen are Evy and her mom, and the former soon learns that she’s pregnant. The film’s meticulous, patient aesthetics are the source of its suspense. Though it delivers a few memorable jolts, it wields stillness to masterful effect.
Hushed and grim, it’s drowning in the bewildering and the oblique, and the closer Evy and Justin get to decrypting what happened to Mike and Jessa, the more they open doors that would have been better left closed.
From a curious religious figurine that keeps materializing on Evy’s mom’s nightstand, to the crayon drawings the podcaster begins reflexively scribbling while she and Justin make their way through the final recordings, Undertone suggests rather than explains, and its camera pans and shifts in audio register are as unnerving as the out-of-focus shapes that lurk in the frame’s background.
“Don’t be afraid of the dark. Be afraid of the silence,” Justin cautions Evy, whose remorse is a veritable noose around her neck. Tuason’s maiden feature is attracted to, and ultimately peers into, the grand chasms and unfathomable abysses where insanity and evil reside. What it spies is the stuff of nightmares, both real and otherworldly.
