Nina Kiri stars as Evy, a paranormal podcast host. Her friend Justin (Adam DiMarco) remotely presents it with Evy, who is the sceptic to his believer. After Evy moves back home to become the caregiver to her dying mother (Michèle Duquet), she records the podcast from there. The latest episode is based on an email sent to Justin which contains 10 audio files of a married couple, Mike and Jessa, (Keana Lyn Bastidas and Jeff Yung) experiencing weird and frightening noises in their home.
Ian Tuason both wrote and directed Undertone, and, whilst a lot of the paranormal features are not original, it did effectively creep me out. That is particularly true of the sequences where they record the podcast. We can only hear rather than see what is going on, and I think that heightened the tension. The strange happenings impacting Evy between recordings have a more familiar feel though and thus are less impressive.
Tuason’s deliberate direction, featuring a lot of very slow pans also helps build a dread like atmosphere, and the decision to set the whole film in Evy’s mum’s house helped cement her sense of claustrophobia and paranoia. Kiri does a very good job, especially as she is on screen alone for much of the run time.
This a nicely atmospheric horror with enough ambiguity to hold my interest but the ending maybe showed too much.
Rating: 7.5 out of 10