Undertone

When my lovely girlfriend and I watch horror films - and we've watched countless ones together over the past 10 years - she always holds a duvet over her eyes when the tension gets too much, whilst I always cover my ears. There isn't much deep thought behind it, apart from the fact that my instinct recognised long ago that it felt like a smarter way to puncture the balloon of suspense, through which scary scenes are inflated to the point of bursting.

It's therefore only understandable that A24, in collaboration with debut director Ian Tuason, has made a horror film that places the soundscape very much at the forefront. Undertone was made for just $500,000, and this is largely because the film's basic mechanisms all use sound as a central focal point, just like Paranormal Activity.

The premise is tailor-made for this setup too. Evy, played by Nina Kiri, is caring for her dying mother, who apparently doesn't have long left, but in her intensely religious home she doesn't exactly feel at ease, and passes the time recording and researching a podcast called "Undertone", which, in authentic true crime style, deals with eerie audio files and speculates on whether there is something more between heaven and earth. The atmosphere immediately becomes more intense when they receive 10 mysterious audio files, which form the backbone of the film, as the files themselves become increasingly bizarre and Evy begins to experience strange occurrences in her mother's quiet home.

This is how Undertone unfolds, and apart from Evy herself and her mother (played by Michèle Duque), there are no other actors physically appearing in this film. We hear the voice of her podcast co-host Justin (voiced by Adam DiMarco) and the mysterious audio files, but Undertone is, just like Paranormal Activity, deliberately intimate, limited, stripped down to the bare essentials. Unlike Paranormal Activity, however, Tuason does not adhere to the found-footage genre framework, but is instead rather brilliantly shot, with beautiful, simple pans, and a camera that tends to linger just a little longer, a style so prevalent amongst younger horror directors, from Damian McCarthy to Jordan Peele.

Undertone is beautifully put together, no doubt about it, and it's even well-acted, particularly by Kiri, who serves as a strong emotional anchor in a film that truly stands or falls on her credibility. The sound design itself is well produced too, bass-heavy, and punchy, and together forms a solid narrative framework on which the rest of the film can rely.

It must be said, however, that Undertone is not a film that opens up in the conventional sense. It's in the so-called "negative space" - the empty spaces, if you will - that the eeriness and tension arise, and not nearly so much in the form of actual visual set pieces, not even towards the film's conclusion, as it remains faithful to its "audio-first" strategy and deviates from it only rarely.

However, one could also argue that certain, less satisfying horror films overexpose their eerie elements too quickly and too often, and that is certainly not the case with Undertone. The end result shows a director who has a firm grasp of these very basic techniques, and whilst it's a success by those standards, it will be interesting to see Tuason command a few more resources to construct scenarios with a few more "moving parts", so to speak.