I’m not burying the lead… A24 will never steer you wrong. Never. Not even in the horror category – need I remind you of how good Talk To Me was? And as such, undertone (yes, all lowercase, because apparently we’re too cool for capital letters now) is not your typical horror movie. undertone isn’t a cheap jump-scare . It isn’t gore porn. undertone is something far more insidious and genuinely disturbing. This is a movie that deals in the weaponizing of sound against you in ways that will make you second-guess every creak in your house for weeks. This movie is an aural mindjob. And I loved it.
Another reason I adore this movie? Writer/director Ian Tuason made this film for $500,000. One half of one million dollars. And he shot it in his parents’ house in Toronto (therapy bills pending), and managed to create what multiple reviewers are calling “the scariest movie since Paranormal Activity.” A24 bought it for seven figures after its Fantasia premiere, and now Tuason’s directing the next Paranormal Activity movie. So yeah, he apparently did something really right with undertone.
The premise is deceptively simple: A paranormal podcast host receives mysterious audio recordings and discovers something demonic hiding in the static. But the execution? Holy hell. This is a masterclass in atmospheric dread, sound design, and making an audience absolutely lose their minds with only ONE on-screen actress and a single location.
If you’re the kind of person who gets scared easily? Maybe skip this one. Multiple reviewers have reported literal panic attacks, screaming in theaters, and not being able to sleep afterward. But if you want to experience genuine, primal fear through your eardrums? This is your movie.
The undertone Trailer
From this point forward, I’m going to walk through the entire movie in detail. If you haven’t seen undertone and you’re the kind of person who gets mad about spoilers, this is your exit ramp. Go watch it in theaters when it drops March 13, 2026. Preferably in Dolby. With the biggest speakers you can find. Come back after. We’ll wait. Everyone else? Let’s dive into this sonic nightmare.
The Podcast Dynamic – A Horror Show About Horror Shows
So here’s the setup. Our protagonist is Evy Babic (Nina Kiri, who you might remember from The Handmaid’s Tale), and she’s in the absolute worst situation imaginable. She’s moved back home to care for her dying mother, who’s in the final stages – hasn’t eaten or drunk anything in days, just lying in bed upstairs making this awful wheezing sound. (Can you say cheerful? Because I can’t.)
But Evy’s got a lifeline to the outside world: her paranormal podcast called “The Undertone.” And this is where the film gets clever with its conceit. Evy co-hosts the show with Justin (voiced by Adam DiMarco – and this is CRITICAL – we NEVER see Justin on screen, only hear his voice). They record at 3 AM because of time zones, which means Evy is alone in this creepy house in the dead of night, headphones on, while her mother is dying upstairs. Brilliance, as far as conceits go. Just rock solid good from a writing standpoint.
The dynamic is classic podcast formula: Evy is the skeptic, Justin is the true believer. Though the movie drops hints that these might just be “roles” they play for entertainment purposes. (You know, like how every ghost hunting show has the believer and the debunker? Same energy.) And the house? Oh man, the house. Religious imagery EVERYWHERE. Ceramic statues of Mary, crosses on the walls, paintings of Jesus staring at you from every corner. It’s like a Catholic gift shop exploded in there. (This will be important later. Obviously.)
Oh, and one more detail that the movie casually drops: Evy is pregnant. Possibly unwanted. There’s a scene where she’s talking to a doctor about… options. So we’ve got: dying mother upstairs, potential new life in her belly, demonic forces in her headphones. Cool cool cool. Everything’s fine – no pressure.
The Movie Walkthrough – Ten Recordings from Hell
The catalyst for everything is an email. Anonymous. No return address. And attached to it? Ten audio recordings. These recordings come from a married couple – Jessa and Mike (we hear them on the recordings but never see them either). The setup is straightforward: they started recording themselves sleeping because they kept hearing weird sounds at night. You know, normal couple stuff. (Except it’s NOT normal, obviously, because this is a HORROR MOVIE.) By the way, this movie totally reminds me of another podcaster closedbox mindjob movie called: Monolith…? Have you all seen that? Definitely check it out.
So Evy and Justin decide to make this into a ten-episode series. Each recording gets its own episode. They’ll analyze the audio, look for anomalies, do their skeptic vs. believer routine. Easy content, right? Wrong. SO wrong.
Most of this film is just Evy. Alone. Hunched over her laptop. And this shouldn’t work – like, on paper, watching someone stare at audio waveforms in GarageBand for 85 minutes sounds like torture. But Tuason and his sound designer David Gertsman turn it into this immersive nightmare. And it’s really really cool – scary – and brilliant.
Because here is what Evy is systematically doing. She’s listening to hours of static and white noise. She’ll come to a particular section and she’ll slow it down. The she plays different sections backwards (you know… backmasking, because DEFINITELY.) Then she’ll find like this tiny, imperceptible sound burrowed deep down in the noise. Need I remind you she’s doing all of this while wearing noise canceling headphones? Then she’ll take the headphones off, peer around the house… then she’ll put the headphones back on, and rinse and repeat.
And the BRILLIANCE of the sound design is this: When Evy puts on those noise-canceling headphones, the film sucks all ambient sound out of the theater. You feel it. You feel the isolation. You suddenly become hyper-aware that she can’t hear if someone (or something) is walking up behind her. And when she takes the headphones off? Every creak, every ambient house sound is AMPLIFIED.
As Evy and Justin dig into these recordings, patterns start emerging:
- Children’s voices singing nursery rhymes
- When you play the nursery rhymes backwards, hidden messages appear
- These messages reference something called Abyzou (a demon from Jewish and Islamic folklore associated with miscarriages and infant mortality – which, given Evy’s pregnancy, is SUPER fun)
- Baby sounds. Crying. Screaming.
- Sounds that might be… children being murdered? (It’s unclear, deliberately so)
- And one particular sound that has a revelation so disturbing that reviewers won’t even spoil what it actually means
The movie also starts playing this psychological trick where you can’t tell: Is that sound IN the recording? Or is it happening in Evy’s house RIGHT NOW?
The Escalation – When the Recordings Bleed Into Reality
This is where undertone earns its reputation.
As Evy gets deeper into the recordings – we’re talking episode 5, 6, 7 of the series – things start happening. The film uses negative space constantly. Long, lingering shots where the camera slowly pans across dark corners of the house. Empty hallways. Mirrors. Shadows. And you’re just waiting for something to appear. Sometimes it does (a flicker in the mirror, her mother’s head turning, a shadow that shouldn’t be there). More often? Nothing happens. But the anticipation is just brilliantly crushing.
The cinematography (by Graham Beasley) uses these tilted angles – sometimes subtle, sometimes extreme – that make everything feel off-kilter. Wrong. Like reality is slightly rotated. And all the while, Evy’s mother is upstairs. Wheezing. Making that awful “death rattle” sound that the nurse warned her about. Life and death happening simultaneously in this house. The religious imagery becomes more prominent. Is this protection? Or is it futile? The crosses and Marys just stare down at Evy as she descends deeper into this audio nightmare.
There are themes being woven throughout – motherhood (her dying mother, her pregnancy, the dead children in the recordings), faith (all the Catholic imagery, demonic forces), isolation, the danger of curiosity. But Tuason never hits you over the head with it. It’s all there in the margins, in the negative space, just like the audio anomalies Evy is hunting throughout the duration of the film.
The Finale – We’re Not Spoiling That Twist (But Trust Us, It’s WILD)
OK, so I’m going to be deliberately vague here because I genuinely think this is a movie you need to experience blind. But I’ll give you the shape of it. In the third act of undertone is what everyone’s talking about. Reviewers are calling it “Exorcist III-style chaos,” which tells you everything and nothing. Multiple horror elements start happening all at once. The slow-burn explodes.
And here’s the pièce de résistance: There are extended blackout sequences. The screen goes completely black. You’re sitting in a dark theater, staring at a black screen, and all you have is these haunting sounds. And what you hear in that darkness? (I’m not going to say. But reviewers report yelling, panic attacks, physical reactions.)
The film builds to a climax that incorporates everything – the podcast, the recordings, the demon Abyzou, the religious imagery, Evy’s pregnancy, her dying mother. It all converges. But the greatest thing about this ending is that it’s 100% left up to the audience to determine what just happened. Was Evy’s demonic haunting real? Did Evy just go mad? Or, was she like, reprogrammed by these audio recordings? What is going on here? You are the one that is left with the decisions to make as to what just happened. And I love it that A24 and Tuason made the mature decision to let the viewer decide for themselves. In this day of second screen dumbness (I need to write a rant about how much I hate that Netflix is pushing film creators to dumb their movies down for people scrolling on social media while watching a movie), to let the audience decide for themselves what exactly is going on, is fantastic.
Now, granted, some people think the ending doesn’t quite stick the landing after all that buildup. Others think it’s perfect precisely because it refuses to give easy answers. I am obviously in the camp that loves the ending, and loves the autonomy granted to the audience. But either way, this aural horror (aurror?) has to be heard to be believed.
Final Thoughts – The Scariest Movie You’ll Hear
undertone is not a perfect movie. The script has some issues – there are plot threads that don’t quite connect, and if you start asking too many questions about podcast logistics, things get fuzzy. (Having attempted a podcast for a little over a year I was scratching my head a little… but that’s easily waved away.) Some of the thematic elements feel borrowed from other horror films (there are definite Hereditary vibes with the pregnancy/demon baby stuff). But here’s the thing: None of that matters when you’re in the theater absolutely losing your mind.
This is a film that understands something fundamental about horror – it’s not what you SEE that scares you, it’s what you HEAR. It’s what you IMAGINE in the dark. It’s the sound that might be in the recording or might be happening right behind you. Nina Kiri gives a tour-de-force performance, carrying basically the entire film alone. She’s reacting to sounds we hear through headphones, sounds we hear in the house, sounds we’re not sure are real. And she sells every second of it.
Ian Tuason made this film for pocket change and turned it into A24’s scariest release in years. The fact that he did it with ONE location, minimal actors, and no dialogue from most of the cast? That’s not a limitation. That’s a FLEX.
But fair warning: See it in a theater with the best sound system you can find. Don’t watch it on your laptop. Don’t watch it on your phone. This movie is desinged for theatrical sound. It’s an “aural horror experience” (their words, not mine), and it needs to be experienced that way. And then maybe… maybe don’t listen to any podcasts for a while after. Just to be safe.
