UNDERTONE -- Undercooked, Underwhelming A24 Horror

Review by Daniel Lima

Not even a week ago, I was at the local independent movie theater watching a midnight showing of the Yukiihiko Tsutsumi’s Egg. An esoteric, wholly unique mix of comedy, psychological horror, and kaiju cinema shot on a shoestring budget, the film was conceived of, written and shot in the span of a month, all because a larger project had fallen through, and the crew had already been assembled with studio space rented. I couldn’t help but think about that movie as I struggled through Undertone, an indie horror film made under clear budgetary and logistical constraints, but utterly fails to achieve anything commendable even with that in mind.

The film, set entirely in one house, follows a young woman taking care of her elderly, bedridden mother as she nears death’s door. At night, she records an investigative supernatural podcast with a remote partner, the skeptic to his believer. After receiving a mysterious email with ten audio files attached, the pair begin to listen and record their reactions live, revealing a terror so foul and pervasive even the skeptic cannot ignore it. At least, that’s the intent.

Within a couple scenes, it is obvious what this is: yet another horror movie that withholds all the actual scares for the finale, nominally because it’s building tension up to that final release, practically because the budget is limited and their shooting in the director’s home and they want to avoid ruining it for a movie. Exacerbating this is that the recording of the podcast episode takes multiple nights, with the days spent on the podcaster’s personal drama. These scenes telegraph that there will be no attempt at even a cheap jump scare for the audience, and after the first few pump fakes any semblance of tension is irrevocably broken. If those headphones are on, you can relax.

Through the daytime scenes, Undertone develops its themes, or rather pantomimes doing so. There are threads about the woman’s relationship with her dying mother, her deadbeat boyfriend, her co-host that may have a thing for her; she has an aversion to all the Catholic imagery around the house; she has a history of drinking. The bifurcated narrative and the limited setting and cast doesn’t allow for any of these ideas to be developed in a meaningful way, and they only tangentially relate to the audio she’s subjecting herself to. It gives the impression that all this is present simply to get an idea more befitting a short film to feature length, with none of these disparate elements coalescing into a greater whole.

Not that there’s much going on at night either. It seems the kernel of an idea here is to find horror in the soundscape, to conjure in the mind of the audience a nightmare more terrifying than the budget would allow to be shown. The narrative structure immediately undermines this; had the entire film taken place in one night, there would be no telling when things would escalate beyond a demonic voice or a strange noise. As it’s broken up over multiple days, you know nothing is going to happen that would force this woman to leave until the very end.
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That besides, Undertone is strangely uninterested in leaning into the premise. Much of the attempts at horror and tension come not from the audio, but the visuals: the camera lingering on a dark corner of the room, a bathroom cabinet swinging open as if there will be a jump scare as soon as it closes, even a disarming use of telephoto lenses to give the house a certain depth. The actual recordings are bog standard spooky fare, a young couple seemingly dealing with demonic possession, and there is little to distinguish it from any use of creepy sounds in any other horror movie. Even in Dolby Cinema, the effect is no different from watching a Blumhouse movie with your eyes closed. It’s certainly every bit as exciting.

It could be argued that all this is a casualty of being produced for under half a million dollars, not a lot of money by the standards of a theatrically released feature. You don’t have overhead for a long post-production process, or to redress the set after complicated practical effects, or to secure the rights to licensed music. That’s why the use of audio is rote in spite of its central focus, nothing actually threatens the characters until the very end, and so much time is spent on the spine-tingling malevolence of listening to public domain nursery rhymes backwards (when the co-host starts dramatically retelling the sordid history of “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” I thought about walking out). Is it not admirable that these filmmakers got a project like this to the finish line at all?

No. Making a movie is certainly a gargantuan undertaking, one that can be quite materially costly, and compromising of some elements here and there is perfectly understandable. There is no budget, however, on the mind’s eye, the initial vision of an artist that then must be negotiated with to bring some semblance of it to life. Egg proves that, Skinamarink proves that, The Evil Dead proves that. There are many issues in the craft of Undertone, but the most fundamental flaw is conceptual: there is simply not enough here to support a story of any length.

Undertone escapes into theaters March 13.

Rating: 1/5