Director: Ian Tuason
Starring: Nina Kiri, and Adam DiMarco
Movie Length: 1 hour 34 minutes
What Mike thought: You’re unlikely to see another film this year quite like Undertone. To be specific, you won’t hear a film like this in 2026. Frankly, undertone deserves more credit than this. In all my horror watching experience over the course of forty years, I haven’t witnessed anything like it.
Leave it to a studio like A24 to deliver an amazingly effective product that’s arrival deserves to be shouted from the rafters. Writer and Director Ian Tuason’s tale of young woman taking care of her non-responsive, dying mother mixes everyday noises with unearthly audio to create a haunting aural landscape.
The caregiving daughter (Nina Kiri) is the cohost of a weekly podcast with a focus on inducing scares. Her podcasting partner Justin (Adam DiMarco) receives an anonymous email with 10 mysterious attached sound recordings. The duo take on the challenge and systematically begin listening to each recording in descending order.
Over the course of the movie, an increasingly unsettling story begins to take form. Visually, there are a lot of disarmingly static shots with occasional slow panning camera movement while Evy (Kiri) listens intently to the recordings through her headset.
However, the visual elements of the film are competently composed, but the real heavy lifting is done through amazingly effective sound design. You are unlikely to find a more effective audio vocabulary used to such impressive effect in any of Undertone’s contemporaries. What makes this feat so remarkable is that there is no soundtrack. Instead, layers of sound form the bedrock of the movie.
Sometimes we hear the soft padding of bare feet walking across a floor and at the other end of the spectrum the audience is treated to a loud, repetitive booming. Peppered throughout are diegetic sounds that add to the general unease that slowly builds until the film’s 10-minute climax.
Are you prepared to be genuinely unnerved? Are you ready to have your perspective of classic children’s songs forever skewed? Then maybe you’re prepared for undertone. This movie is unique in its approach and consequential effectiveness. The filmmaker set out with an obvious objective and clearly achieved it.
Mike’s rating: undertone earns an 8.5
undertone is now in theaters.
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