‘Don’t be afraid of the dark. Be afraid of the silence...’
When you watch as many horror films as I do, it’s very rare to stumble across something that is genuinely frightening. Aside from occasional jump scares (which are often more exhilarating than actually frightening), the only films that have really gotten under my skin in recent years are Skinamarink, the Smile movies and The Black Phone. Well, you can now add Undertone to that list…
Evy (Nina Kiri) is the co-creator of The Undertone – a popular podcast about the supernatural that she hosts with her friend, Justin (Adam DiMarco). Over the course of one cursed evening, Evy and Justin (who never appears on screen) attempt to record a special episode about an anonymous and seemingly random string of letters and ten audio files by listening to the files for the first time live on the air. Evy, the more sceptical of the pair, finds herself drawn in by the bizarre natures of the tapes.
I will begin by saying that I really wish I had seen this in a cinema. The sound design is utterly phenomenal throughout to the point where you could listen to the dialogue from this film as a radio play, and it would still be utterly effective. Indeed, the film began life as a radio play before first-time writer-director Ian Tuason raised $500,000 to adapt it into a feature film. A24 eventually picked up Undertone for international distribution, where it has to date made $21.1 million – an incredible return for a low-budget indie. Crucially, Tuason justifies the leap from radio to cinema with inventive camerawork and an ominous sense of dread that pervades the film and becomes almost unbearable during crucial moments. While the plot is fairly thin, the haunting sound design ensures that Undertone remains compelling throughout, and its motif of taking popular children’s nursery rhymes and using backmasking to render them sinister is both ingenious and incredibly unsettling.
Undertone made me think twice about staying up on my own after dark. It made me double-check that I had locked the front door. Most of all, Tuason’s film, like a particularly potent nightmare, stuck with me long after the credits rolled. This is a deeply disturbing experience.
