Review: ‘Undertone’ is an unnerving, slow-burning audio horror experience
2026 / Dir. Ian Tuason
Rating: 4/5
Watch if you like: Paranormal Activity, The Blair Witch Project, going down dark internet rabbit holes at 3 am until you no longer understand what’s real or not.
When you have to care for a sick parent, your universe shrinks. The outside world starts to feel alien as friends’ lives move forward, while you seem to exist in a state of stasis, caught in a cycle of stress and exhaustion. That’s the backdrop of Ian Tuason’s debut Undertone. This genuinely unnerving, slow-burning horror experience was made for just $500,000 and succeeds by using its budget limitations to its advantage.
Evy (Nina Kiri, The Handmaid’s Tale) is in the final weeks of her mother’s terminal illness, weathered from caretaking, and, at this point, just hoping for the end. Her relationship is barely a thing anymore, and there’s a brother out there somewhere who is too immature to take care of himself, much less his dying mother. Her only release and connection to the outside world is a podcast she co-hosts with her friend Justin (Adam DiMarco, The White Lotus, Overcompensating), where she plays the skeptic as they investigate strange internet urban legends.
Reinforcing her isolation, we never see any other characters besides her bedridden mother, and never leave their dated home filled with unsettling religious iconography. Justin is a friendly but disembodied voice that can express concern and care without offering any significant help to her in her situation, or when things start to get weird as they record their current episode intermittently over several days. This time, Justin has received a series of 10 voice note recordings from a defunct email address.
During each recording session, they listen to two or three recordings made by a couple to track how one of them is talking in their sleep. As you might expect, the recordings get increasingly disturbing, and soon we’re in the realm of hidden messages in children’s nursery rhymes and demonic terror. When she’s not recording with Justin, Evy will also do her own research on her computer or look after her mother while odd things start happening, like statues of the Virgin Mary moving around or Evy’s mom seeming to move about the house without Evy ever seeing her.
Tuason and his crew of relative unknowns lean into minimalism, turning their budgetary shortcomings into a strength. I was fortunate to experience this film on a Dolby Cinema sound system, which is how I would suggest you see Undertone, given how the film was mixed. The film makes great use of the space in the theater to transport us into Evy’s house. We feel the distance of a creek upstairs or the closeness of the beep of a microwave behind her. As the podcasters listen to more files, we start to question if the sounds are just coming from Evy’s headphones or from somewhere deep in the house. When we near the finale, the sound design truly becomes unhinged with booming bass pulsating through the theater and each channel filled with sinister signals.
Without the ability to throw Conjuring levels of haunted-house nonsense at us, Undertone’s cinematography and editing create a different type of fear. While we’re listening, the eye is free to wander, with shots often framed to have Evy in a small corner of the screen and an enormous black hallway or doorway behind her that may or may not hold the faint outline of a ghoul or your own projected inner darkness. Cinematographer Graham Beasley will also create tension by slowly panning away from Evy to another part of the room, giving us the feeling of potential danger. Later on, as the cinematic language becomes more unhinged, the camera will pan left out of Evy’s sight, then return to her, breaking the established spatial camera language, or it may tilt or turn entirely upside down.
I can’t wait to watch Undertone on my own in a dark bedroom late at night due to the way editor Sonny Atkins will cut to black and hold it for a few extra seconds before returning to find Evy in another location than we’d expect, creating more tension about what may be waiting for us when we cut back. This technique gets incorporated into the film’s terrifying conclusion to great effect.
If you go into Undertone expecting constant jump scares or Exorcist-levels of demonic insanity, this will not be the movie for you. But if you’re ready to experience a clever, well-made independent film, then you’re in luck. Above all else, Undertone delivers a funhouse horror ride made to be heard in a theater where every creaking seat, sound of anxious breath, or the older couple sitting next to you who had had enough and left (yes, this happened during my screening) only adds to the experience.