A paranormal podcaster begins to notice strange occurrences around her house in the incredibly effective audio-based horror film The Undertone, written and directed by Ian Tuason, presented through the Fantasia International Film Festival.
First off, The Undertone is eerily effective and straight-up fully and compellingly scary. Tuason’s film is effortlessly spooky, unnerving, and incredibly well done. It’s all the more impressive that The Undertone only features two actors on screen, a few more in voice, and all in a single, claustrophobic location. At a tight 85 minutes, Tuason creates his world and characters, builds it up, frightens the audience, and gets out.
Evy is a podcaster, co-hosting “The Undertone”, a show all about spooky things – hauntings, ghosts, legends, and lore, with a hefty dose of debunking (to steal a line from my friends Gabi and Kim’s spooky/true-crime podcast Ghoulish Tendencies). She’s the skeptic, he’s the believer. In the episode they’re working on (weirdly split over several recording sessions, I’m not sure how this would work in the real world, but the breaks are effective in the film), he’s playing a series of recordings sent to him detailing an increasing haunting of a couple on the edge of welcoming their child. As the pair listens, a haunting increases in Evy’s own home, where she’s caring for her dying mother.
The Undertone is nearly all audio-based. It does have a visual component as things get worse for Evy, but the audio is the draw. It is based around a podcast after all. It’s legitimately scary as all hell, on both halves of the equation. It’s a slow build, although it feels uneasy immediately. The sounds, little slices cutting and gradually building, are expertly designed and utilized. More than once, I thought it was a sound in my own home. Was it… Maybe the movie was coming true. It is a cursed media movie after all.
For once, a film uses “nursery rhymes but creepy” in a way that isn’t cringe. Among sleep walking and talking, screams, and more, the recorded couple are hearing and singing the rhymes, which have often been rumoured to have dark stories behind them, tying them to a demon or something. That’s not meant to be dismissive. I appreciated the way whatever’s happening to them is kept at arm’s length. Yes, it may be bleeding into Evy’s life, but the pairing of the stories allows them to be foils. Add in audio trickery like backmasking, whispers, levels of sound, and the spookiness of one person hearing one thing and the other not, and The Undertone is an audio-based nightmare.
Nina Kiri is excellent as Evy. She’s the center of the movie; outside of the mostly sleeping sick mother, she’s the only person on screen. She has to carry The Undertone, and she does. It’s a quiet, brooding, and slowly building performance of uncomfortable aloneness, isolated and lost. All the emotional terror of dealing with a dying mother, a growing fetus, and whatever the hell is happening around her is a careful balance, and it’s pulled off. In support are the voices of Kris Holden-Ried as Justin and Kana Lyn Bastidas and Jeff Yung as the couple. Holden-Ried has one hell of a voice, a broadcaster’s ease. It has this timber that sets into the flow, strangely comforting. The married couple’s increasing terror and their world is built with skill, selling their situation with only their voices.
Ian Tuason uses his single location (and actress) to create strong tension and claustrophobia. It’s a film where little directly appears, but one watches the negative space, feeling the walls and loneliness pushing in. It’s terrifying. The angles, the colors, and the deep darkness all increase the terror experienced by Evy. She feels watched, and the audience feels it too. Never cutting to the outside (that I can recall, when I rewatch this – and I will, I’ll update if I’m wrong), Tuason uses the interior of the home to reflect Evy’s internal horror and mindset. Fascinating.
The Undertone is one of my favorite films of the Fantasia International Film Festival, with writer-director Ian Tuason using its simple concept with a terryfinfing complexity. It’s scary, expertly designed, and wholly engrossing. I can’t wait for The Undertone to reach wider audiences.
The Fantasia International Film Festival runs July 16th through August 3rd, 2025.