Undertone: Sound as Terror
Ian Tuason's debut feature Undertone is a formally innovative horror film that makes audio itself the primary site of dread. Distributed by A24, the film tracks podcast hosts investigating inexplicable audio recordings while simultaneously following Evy as she provides end-of-life care for her dying mother. This interweaving creates a meditation on listening as an act of intimate witness, on how sound carries information that sight cannot process.
Nina Kiri inhabits Evy with the particular emotional exhaustion of someone existing in a state of sustained anticipatory grief. Her mother's death approaches with the terrible certainty of clockwork. Every day is both ordinary and fraught with the awareness that ordinary is running out. Kiri's performance consists largely of responses to what we cannot see—the off-screen presence of her mother, the sounds that carry meaning her entire body seems to understand. Adam DiMarco, as the male podcast host, brings skeptical intelligence to his portions of the narrative.
What distinguishes Undertone from conventional audio-based horror is its sophisticated understanding of what sound actually communicates. Cinematographer Graham Beasley and editor Sonny Atkins make the counterintuitive decision to constrain visual information precisely as audio becomes more prominent. Long passages operate in near-darkness or show only fragmentary images. We're positioned as listeners rather than observers, forced into the particular vulnerability of receiving information without visual confirmation. This creates genuine cognitive dissonance.
The mystery at the film's center involves audio recordings of indeterminate origin—voices, sounds, acoustic phenomena that resist conventional explanation. But Tuason refuses the conventional haunted house approach where visual evidence accumulates toward inevitable confrontation. Instead, the film operates through acoustic phenomenology: careful attention to what sounds carry meaning, how listening itself can constitute horror. The podcast hosts gradually recognize that certain sonic frequencies trigger specific emotional responses, that sound operates on the nervous system in ways that bypass rational interpretation.
The film's greatest accomplishment lies in its innovative narrative strategy. By bifurcating the narrative—splitting attention between the podcast investigation and Evy's maternal caregiving—Tuason creates unexpected resonance between seemingly disparate narratives. Both threads involve listening to something unknowable: the podcast hosts listening to inexplicable sounds, Evy listening to her mother's declining body. Both activities require interpretation of information that resists conclusive understanding. Caregiving is its own form of mystery.
Sonny Atkins' editing proves crucial to the film's effectiveness. Rather than cutting toward conventional visual information, Atkins maintains shots that permit sound to dominate consciousness. Silence becomes as significant as noise. The absence of expected audio creates tension as effectively as disturbing recordings. The film trains the audience to listen actively, to locate threat in acoustic nuance.
Undertone announces itself as the first successful adaptation of podcast narrative to cinema. Rather than attempting to visualize podcast experience through conventional dramaturgy, Tuason accepts the form's inherent audiocentricity and creates visual strategies that honor that primacy. Horror's future might involve returning attention to sensory information beyond the visual.