Sonic Terror
*Author’s note: to read the pdf version of the review, click here
On paper, Undertone should have been a massive hit for me. I am not only a huge audiophile (seriously, check out my Spotify playlist), but I also used to be heavy into audio production back in my late teens and early twenties, where I developed an admiration for backmasking, hidden messages, sound layering, etc. Couple all of that with a love for the movie that Undertone has drawn comparisons to, The Blair Witch Project, and this movie should have really resonated (very punny) with me.
Sadly, I may have bought into the hype a little too hard once again.
I had first heard about Undertone last year, as many of the horror film reviewers were seriously hyping it up coming out of Fantasia Fest; this was late July, so I had been waiting for this one for a little over 7 months! During that time, more and more people had been hailing the movie as “one of the scariest” (I should know by now never to trust this praise) new films that they had seen. Expectations were high, but I kind of knew what to expect going in, especially with the Blair Witch Project comparisons.
For what it is–full on auditory horror–Undertone definitely works. The film’s components all add up to a consistently tense, nerve wracking watch from start to finish: the movie takes place exclusively in a darkened house filled with unsettling religious iconography, and the audio design is downright wonderful. Undertone doesn’t simply rely on long instances of silence followed by auditory jump scares; the film instead opts for slow burn, developed, auditory callbacks with an almost dizzying rapidity. The sounds cloak you in tension and fear, leaving you reeling, anticipating what is to come. Backmasking is cool, and children’s nursery rhymes are creepy AF! Undertone should be studied for years to come simply for its audio design.
The genius of Undertone (much like The Blair Witch Project) is in the way it uses intricate/unique scene composition mixed with lore building. Plenty of times the movie messes with the viewer’s minds, tricking us into “filling in the blanks”–for example, there are scenes where the camera will pan through a darkened corridor, and the audience holds its breath in anticipation of catching a glimpse of what is lurking there. There are also a bunch of cool, disorienting scenes where the camera is positioned at strange angles, which mess with the viewer’s equilibrium. Cinematographer Graham Beasley deserves so much credit for keeping the atmospheric tension steady throughout the course of the film’s 94 minute runtime.
When it comes to the lore building aspect, it is a bit of a win/lose situation. The win is that writer/director Ian Tuason does a good job giving us something to be afraid of; in regards to the entity itself, the lore building here reminded me a lot of Sinister. The loss however is that, while the film spends much of its runtime giving us spooky lore for the entity, as well as motivation enough (just enough) for why it is targeting the main character , Tuason does extremely little in terms of getting us to care about the two characters you actually see on screen! Actress Nina Kiri does a good job pretty much singlehandedly carrying the movie on screen as podcaster Evy, but Tuason fails to give the character an emotional hook besides she is alone in a house looking after her comatose mother, who is set to pass any day now. You also don’t really get a good feel for the actual Undertone podcast: you are instead simply just thrown into Evy and cohost Justin recording (in the most silly, poorly timed intervals) an episode based on an e-mail he received. This aspect of the plot is extremely thin, and is one of the major drawbacks to the film.
Undertone is what it is–a sonic nightmare–filled with an underlying dread that will either succeed or fail based upon the viewer’s own imagination. While I didn’t feel like it ever reached its full potential (as I will discuss in the spoilers section), and it isn’t even close to being “one of the scariest movies ever”, it is still a decent enough, tense, unsettling experience worthy of a watch in the theater if you want to support small budget horror, or at least at home IF you have a GOOD sound system,
Click here for a SPOILER FILLED discussion of the ending
A LOT of the complaints people have about The Blair Witch Project are also going to inevitably be attached to Undertone–afterall, the movie ends up showing you nothing aside from a few creepy religious paintings, and a few drawings/screenshots of Abyzou. I know the entire point of the movie was to be a sonic experience, and to allow the audio to produce the scares, but man was it a total let down that we didn’t even get a spooky robed shadow figure at the end–just Evy’s mom attacking her. I get that that was kind of a twist, but still, just having Abyzou in the background would have done wonders for that ending and saved it from the criticism that it doesn’t actually show anything.
In a bit of exciting news, it was just announced that Tuason will next direct the newest addition of the Paranormal Activity franchise, so hopefully with a bigger budget he will be able to do more visually while also maintaining the same level of tension.