Fear Finds Another Frequency

Read Time:8 Minute, 43 Second

MOVIE REVIEWS
undertone
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Genre: Horror, Thriller
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 34m
Director: Ian Tuason
Writer: Ian Tuason
Cast: Nina Kiri, Adam DiMarco, Michèle Duquet, Keana Lyn Bastidas, Jeff Yung, Ryan Turner, Ari Millen
Where to Watch: available now; watch here: www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: Horror movies spend so much time asking us to watch closely that UNDERTONE immediately feels different by making listening the more dangerous activity. Writer-director Ian Tuason builds his feature debut around something almost embarrassingly simple: a woman puts on headphones and listens to recordings. That it becomes genuinely unnerving is the clearest sign Tuason understands exactly where his movie’s strengths are.

Evy (Nina Kiri) co-hosts a paranormal podcast called The Undertone with Justin (Adam DiMarco), but ghost stories are one of the few things in her life she can still approach with some emotional distance. She has returned to her childhood home to care for her dying mother, and recording the show provides a routine while everything around her becomes increasingly difficult. Evy is also skeptical enough to search for rational explanations whenever their listeners offer something supposedly supernatural.

That skepticism gets tested when Justin receives a collection of mysterious audio files involving a couple and a strange series of events. The recordings become material for the podcast, giving Evy something new to analyze while she sits alone in the house late at night. Each file adds another piece to the story, but listening to them also begins affecting the space around her in ways that become increasingly difficult to dismiss.

UNDERTONE came out of Tuason's original idea for an audio-only project, and you can feel that concept underneath practically everything. The sound isn't decoration added to make already scary scenes scarier; it's often the scene. Voices change position, tiny noises emerge behind other noises, and certain recordings make you wonder whether something came from Evy's computer, somewhere inside the house, or somewhere much closer to you.

That makes headphones or a strong surround setup almost part of the experience. David Gertsman's sound design frequently plays with direction and distance, making the room we're sitting in feel connected to the one Evy occupies. Several moments made me instinctively question whether a noise had actually come from somewhere around me, and that kind of reaction is hard to manufacture once an audience starts expecting it.

Tuason wisely doesn't compensate for the audio-heavy premise by filling the screen with constant movement. Evy often sits at a desk, walks through familiar rooms, or stares into darkness while we search the frame for something that may not be there. Graham Beasley's cinematography turns ordinary doorways, hallways, corners, and empty spaces into places worth monitoring, particularly once the movie teaches us that seeing nothing doesn't necessarily mean nothing is happening.

That restraint also creates one of UNDERTONE's bigger challenges. The movie runs 94 minutes and operates almost entirely within one location, with Kiri carrying nearly everything we physically see. Tuason deliberately repeats routines as Evy records another episode, checks on her mother, listens to another file, and tries to get through another night. Sometimes that repetition tightens the pressure; other times, you can feel the movie taking a very long route back to essentially the same situation.

Kiri is the reason that approach works as often as it does. Evy isn't written as someone eagerly chasing the supernatural because the movie needs her to make bad decisions. She investigates because that's literally part of what she does, and her skepticism makes it believable that she keeps listening even after the recordings start getting under her skin. Kiri also handles Evy's exhaustion especially well, letting the stress of caregiving and the growing supernatural threat gradually blur together.

The connection between those two parts of Evy's life is important because UNDERTONE isn't simply about a podcaster finding cursed audio. Tuason developed the film after spending years caring for his own ill parents, eventually shooting it in his childhood home, and that experience gives Evy's situation a personal foundation. The fear surrounding her mother's approaching death isn't something the supernatural storyline replaces; it's already occupying the house before anything impossible starts happening.

That gives the film more emotional substance than its hook initially promises, although I don't think it always pushes that connection as far as it could. Grief, guilt, fear, and the inability to control death are sitting right there beside the paranormal story. Still, UNDERTONE sometimes becomes so invested in its collection of recordings that Evy's personal situation starts feeling secondary. The two ideas eventually intersect, yet the emotional material could have carried even more weight if the screenplay had spent additional time developing Evy beyond the immediate circumstances.

The podcast itself occasionally creates another issue. Conversations with Justin can sound more constructed than spontaneous, particularly when the pair need to explain what they're hearing or provide information that an audience needs to understand the next recording. DiMarco's voice performance is likable enough to establish the relationship. Still, some exchanges feel designed to move the investigation forward rather than sound like two people who have hosted a show together for a long time.

There is still something clever about using a paranormal podcast to create uncertainty. Evy and Justin are accustomed to analyzing stories, questioning evidence, researching folklore, and turning frightening experiences into content. That process gives Evy a built-in reason to keep listening, even when every horror instinct tells her to close the laptop and never open another attachment again. Curiosity isn't an artificial character flaw here; it's part of her job.

Tuason also understands that explaining a frightening sound can destroy it. Some of the most effective material in UNDERTONE comes from trying to identify something that stays just unclear enough for our imagination to fill in. A distorted voice or barely recognizable phrase becomes far more upsetting when we aren't completely certain what we're hearing, and the movie repeatedly uses that uncertainty instead of immediately showing us the source.

At times, the technique starts to lose some of its power through repetition. Once we understand that another recording will probably contain something disturbing and that Evy will probably discover some connection to her surroundings, the structure becomes easier to anticipate. UNDERTONE keeps finding interesting variations in the sound, but the story underneath them isn't quite as unpredictable.

The movie's slow approach will be the dividing line for a lot of viewers. This isn't a film that spends 20 minutes establishing the premise and then explodes into nonstop supernatural activity. Tuason wants us sitting in Evy's discomfort, looking at the same corners, hearing the same household silence, and becoming increasingly sensitive to tiny changes. I admire that patience, even if there are stretches where tightening the edit would have made the tension stronger rather than sacrificing it.

What never becomes questionable is the technical accomplishment. This was Tuason's first feature, developed as a small single-location production before A24 acquired it following its 2025 Fantasia premiere, where it went on to win the festival's Gold Audience Award for Best Canadian Feature. A24's version also made changes from that initial festival cut, including replacing the voices of Justin and Dr. Ram with Adam DiMarco and Ari Millen.

None of that production history is necessary to appreciate what lands on screen, but it does make the control Tuason shows even more impressive. He knows when an empty frame has become threatening, when a noise should remain unexplained, and when withholding the expected scare is more effective than delivering one. UNDERTONE rarely goes for the easy release of tension, which means the audience can spend a surprisingly long time waiting for something that may never appear.

I don't think the story ultimately matches the creativity of the sound design, and that keeps me at 3.5/5 rather than pushing higher. The recordings become scarier than the mythology surrounding them, and the final stretch doesn't deepen the ideas about grief and guilt quite enough to match how carefully they were established. The film can also overexplain material that was considerably creepier when it existed as nothing more than an unidentified sound.

Still, UNDERTONE pulled off something that matters far more to me in horror: it made me uncomfortable using methods I don't see repeated so often. Tuason understands that our brains desperately want to identify what we're hearing, especially when we're sitting in darkness waiting for an explanation. By forcing us to listen alongside Evy, he turns that instinct against us and makes every tiny noise worth questioning.

There are scarier movies and certainly faster ones, but UNDERTONE has a way of following you into the quiet after it's finished. Once the screen goes dark and there isn't anything left to watch, you may find yourself paying considerably more attention to everything you can hear.

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[photo courtesy of A24, BLACK FAWN FILMS, SLATERVERSE PICTURES]

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