Undertone? Underwhelming

Close your eyes for a minute, and think really hard. Try to come up with the most generic, derivative and overused tropes in modern horror. Write them down on a sheet of paper or an online document and maybe add in a bit of dialogue every now and then.

Congrats! You’ve probably written a better version of A24’s latest horror movie Undertone –a film that does nothing but prove to its audience that podcasting equipment is indeed too accessible.

We follow Evy (Nina Kiri), who is the sole caretaker of her recently comatose mother. She, alongside her friend Justin (Adam DiMarco), is the co-host of a “paranormal” podcast, where they listen to creepy audio recordings sent in by their viewers. Their job takes a turn for the sinister, however, when they receive an anonymous file with – surprise surprise – scary audio recordings.

Leaving aside the predictability of the plot, I’d say that it was extremely hasty in its development. Undertone took a very paternalistic approach to communicate with its audience. All of the exposition in the film is primarily acquired through a few, very explicit ways: google searches, phone calls and literal confessions when the characters are alone.

It was like they were two teenagers on a Discord call without a game to play, and we had to pay the price for it

That wasn’t its only fault in dialogues, though. For a film that relies heavily on sound-design and on the fact that one out of the two characters with the most dialogues isn’t even shown on screen, the dialogue was almost cringeworthy. Its humour was very forced, and I really didn’t get the vibe that these two characters had been hosting a podcast together for god-knows-how long. It was like they were two teenagers on a Discord call without a game to play, and we had to pay the price for it.

The introduction to the movie began with ‘Ba Ba Black Sheep’ being sung in a slow, morose manner and I’d already started to cringe. It felt like something you would see in a parody of a horror film – and it set the tone for the rest of the movie as being painfully all too generic. The motif of creepily singing old children’s nursery rhymes has been tried and tested, and there was hardly a fresh take on it in Undertone.

Moreover, the movie thought it had justified itself enough to throw in random Biblical imagery with minimal plot relevance. After the Conjuring universe, Western supernatural horror movies have gotten way too comfortable tossing around Biblical imagery with little to no meaning just to invoke cheap emotions in the audience, and I’ve grown sick of it.

Especially because the main “villain” of Undertone was pretty much unrelated to this imagery, missing the threshold of even the most basic Western supernatural horror. The main “villain” – a demon by the name of Abyzou – seems randomly picked, as if the writers were trying to intentionally look for obscure ancient demons to “spice up” the movie.

There was a lot about Undertone that was unnatural, but not in the unsettling way that you would expect from an atmospheric horror movie

While it did seem randomly picked, I will have to give the movie some credit as to how the demon manifests herself in the film. Without giving much away, all I have to say is that it was well-done, and the idea of it genuinely creeped me out. Its relation to our protagonist, however, was still careless as ever and seemed like a huge reach. There was a lot about Undertone that was unnatural, but not in the unsettling way that you would expect from an atmospheric horror movie. It was just very choppy.

A major strength of the movie though, was sound design. It was clear in its intention to utilise sound design to create the atmosphere it was going for – established in the opening sequence with the whistle of the tea kettle and the singing of the (albeit cliché) nursery rhyme. Experiencing it in the theatres was tantalising, to say the least, and did keep me engaged because of that.

If you’re someone that prefers psychological thrillers and implied horror rather than supernatural films, I’d definitely recommend that you sit this one off. But if you’re looking to turn your brain off and are looking for more of a theatre-going experience than anything else, Undertone might just be the film for you.

★★