There’s a swirl of creepy noises in A24’s new hyped-up horror Undertone – screaming, gargling, singing, banging – but nothing is quite loud enough to drown out the swirl of films it’s cribbing from. The debut feature from writer-director Ian Tuason, about horror podcasters who receive a set of mysterious recordings, has elements of Paranormal Activity, Session 9, Hereditary, The Ring, The Blair Witch Project and The Exorcist, enough sighs of familiarity to give horror fans a scary case of deja vu. It’s not that total originality is expected at this particular moment (this weekend’s Send Help has been touted as Misery meets Castaway), but given the genre’s overcrowd, it’s hard to see what pushes Undertone above the noise.
What it does do is make for an impressively resourceful use of a low budget, the whole thing costing about $500,000. It’s all shot in one house (Tuason’s actual home) and for the most part, any sinister goings on are restricted to audio footage, heard through the headphones of our lead Eva (Nina Kiri, who reminds me of a young Alice Eve). She’s living back home with her terminally ill mother, fending calls from a thoughtless boyfriend and patiently awaiting those from her friend, and maybe one that got away, Justin (the voice of White Lotus breakout Adam DiMarco, replacing the original voice after the A24 acquisition). The pair co-host a podcast that analyses creepy tales, Eva as the skeptic and Justin as the believer, the pair’s flirtatious pitter-patter positioning them as the Mulder and Scully of the audio world.
Eva is struggling – her mother isn’t eating and has stopped communicating, she’s worried she might be pregnant, she’s barely sleeping – and while the podcast has provided an escape, their latest discovery is starting to make things worse. Justin has been sent an email with 10 audio files (what if Session 9 plus one) which follow a couple as the boyfriend records his partner’s sleep-talking. Each file gets progressively more concerning, spinning the pair off into research that goes from playing children’s songs backwards to reading up on a demonic figure who kills children (there are also elements of a less effective screenlife thriller like Searching or Missing). Eva soon finds it hard to continue convincingly playing Mulder as the lines blur between what she’s hearing on the tapes and experiencing in the house.
Tuason neatly exploits a relatably vulnerable position we’ve all put ourselves in, when the volume is too high on those noise-cancelling headphones that are a little too effective. What else might be happening around us that we’re not aware of? His camera pans back and moves around as Eva is recording, keeping us with her audio but allowing us to see what she can’t, and the build works until it doesn’t. The formula starts to get repetitive as Eva records in small increments then fears something creepy is in the house (the podcast’s start-stop-leave-sleep-start-stop-start-pause recording technique feels wildly inefficient), and as Tuason adds more hokey elements to the plot, as characters essentially read out Wikipedia entries, one’s interest starts to fade. Hinging the plot on the killing of babies is of course magnetically awful, but Tuason’s corkboard plotting gets tangled up in itself, and while the clips still provide unsettling moments, it’s unclear what anything truly means.
After starting slow, Tuason then lets loose in the last act, turning a campfire tale into a rickety funhouse, throwing everything at the wall as if he were making Poltergeist fanfic. Kiri’s fear remains palpable, but ours has long gone, the move from audio tease to visual bombast proving to be a grave, and exhausting, mistake. But Tuason also wants to remain inscrutable, and so ends with a now all-too-familiar “is that it?” endnote, giving us the worst of both worlds. We’re led down a dark alley and then stranded, earlier promise fading into a crash of unscary confusion, Tuason never able to really find a way to link the world of the audio files and the real world (unlike in, I know it’s a broken record but, Session 9). It’s a film that manages to be both cluttered and empty.
Undertone is ultimately less standalone horror and more sizzle reel for what Tuason can do (as well as warning of what he can’t quite do just yet), and as that it’s worked just fine. Not only did it get snapped up at Fantasia fest by A24 for a reported seven-figure deal, but it’s also nabbed him the Paranormal Activity reboot, inviting him into the world of Blumhouse. Scarily effective then, and a far more satisfying ending than anything he’s yet to conjure.
Undertone is screening at the Sundance film festival and is out in cinemas on 13 March
