undertone

As horror continues to thrive through the 2020s, A24 is preparing to drop a terrifying gem in Ian Tuason’s excellent “undertone.” It’s a movie that has some of the themes that have dominated the form lately like grief and lack of faith but embeds them in a sonic and visual nightmare that announces its filmmaker as a major talent. Horror directors often cut corners when it comes to form, using cheap tricks like jump scares, overcooked music cues, or even just presuming that the spooky storytelling will do all the work for them. Tuason prioritizes elements such as negative space, a constrained POV, canted angles, and simply incredible sound design to lock viewers into the same nightmare as his protagonist. He doesn’t want you to watch something unfold; he wants you to feel it as sound and image reach something primally fearful. Some will argue that all of the themes of “undertone” don’t connect, but that’s a feature, not a bug. This is a film that doesn’t feel the need to explain itself. Nightmares rarely do.

Undertone began life as a found-footage radio play, which you can totally see: Tuason and his sound team carefully and deliberately use the aural space as a storytelling realm all of its own. When Evy slips on her expensive-looking headphones, we the viewer slip into the pristine, noise-cancelled space she occupies; when she starts hearing things that may or may not be there — from the increasingly disturbing recordings of a cursed married couple, to the possessed-sounding podcast phone-ins — we hear them too, the entire span of the audio space utilised to full, nerve-jangling effect. (If you’re able to see the film in a cinema kitted out with the most modern, spatially crisp speakers, it makes a difference.) But we are also invited to imagine what we can’t hear, the noise-cancelling headphones generating a unique kind of anxiety, alluded to by Tuason’s camera, which often lingers in unsettling angles and ominous framing.