Starring Nina Kiri, Adam DiMarco

Written & Directed by Ian Tuason

A24 – in Cinemas Now

Evy (Nina Kiri) is struggling to balance the care of her terminally ill mother with producing a popular paranormal podcast, so when an anonymous listener submits some unsettling audio files, her Scully-like scepticism is tested like never before.

Back in 1990, accused in court of hiding backwards demonic messages in their song ‘Better By You, Better Then Me’, Judas Priest’s lead singer Robert Halford wearily observed that if they had really wanted to impel their fans subliminally to do something, it would have been to buy more of their records. Like Halford, I’ve never been persuaded of the horror potential of the whole backwards demon-speak riff, which, I realised, a few minutes into Ian Tuason’s low-budget podcast horror was going to be a bit of a hindrance if I was to engage with Evy’s spooky audio plight.

The set-up is perfectly decent. Tuason deftly tees up Evy’s claustrophobic world, restricting the action entirely to her dying mother’s house with any other speaking characters either off-screen or heard through her headphones. Evy is trapped in a world that isn’t her own, every surface adorned with the iconography of her mother’s devout Catholicism, and it’s clear that now her mother has descended into her final coma, there is a lot that remains unsaid between them. So when Evy’s pod partner, Justin (Adam DiMarco) presents her with some anonymously submitted audio of a young couple bedevilled by backwards nursery rhymes invoking all sorts of demonic nastiness, the faith, fear and guilt of both scenarios are doomed to become entwined.

There are some genuine wig-out moments as Evy becomes increasingly unsure as to whether what she is hearing belongs to the podcast audio, or to paranormal events occurring in the house itself.

Unfortunately this initially effective device is Tuason’s only trick, which he puts on rinse and repeat until several people in the auditorium around me turned to their phones for alternative entertainment. Normally I ‘reign’ down Hell (as Donald Trump might say) on such transgressors, but I could see their point. As the parallel plotting became ever more incomprehensible, the movie was reduced to a seemingly random audio collage of clicks, screams, demonic voices and backwards nursery rhymes while the camera along with increasingly deranged Evy wandered the house to no particular end as far as I could discern. I’m guessing there was some kind of backstory explanation unfolding in the final act – it seemed to be a sort of pro-life horror parable – but then again perhaps not, as by the end I had no idea what was going on and, worse, I had stopped caring.

Verdict: Undertone is a wasted opportunity. Tuason has the cinematic skill to cook up a chill or two, but lacks the storytelling craft to turn them in to a satisfying narrative nosh-up, leaving Undertone decidedly ‘under-done’. 4/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com