4/12 ForReel Score | 2/5 Stars

I do not spend my time listening to true crime or creepypasta podcasts. I never have. They don’t interest me in the slightest. As such, perhaps I am just not the target audience for Ian Tuason’s Undertone, whose scares revolve entirely around exploration of audio files with conspiratorial and potentially supernatural origins. However, I am a sucker for horror movies that toy with new media if they are convincing enough to feel like they’re recreating something real. The Blair Witch Project. Paranormal Activity. Hell, I even had fun with Unfriended. Unfortunately, Undertone feels like a forced live action video component to the kind of hokey, dime a dozen podcast that your co-worker swears is actually good. Every moment is painfully stagnant and staged, never even creepy, let alone scary.

We follow undertone podcast host Evy (Nina Kiri) as she hosts a particularly uncomfortable series of episodes with her unseen co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco). Things are already not going great for her. She’s living in her dying and mute mother’s (Michèle Duquet) house with barely enough time to record these eps in the kitchen. As she annoyingly puts it in their opening interaction, Evy is the skeptic to Justin’s santa claus believer. They open the film by bantering over a red tinted video of a woman with an upsetting expression that reportedly caused a mass suicide (this is the scariest image you will see in the film’s ninety four minutes) before moving on to an email marked “lol.” It has 10 audio files, each chronicling a mysterious couple who are gradually descending into madness. As they listen, mysterious happenings start occurring in Evy’s home, causing her to slowly lose her grip on what is part of the episode and what is real.

The marketing for Monday’s Dolby screening insisted that seeing Undertone in the sound forward format was the only way to experience the film’s terrors in their full glory. If that is the case, then my heart aches for the vast majority of audiences who will pay to see this in a standard format. These audio files, mostly comprised of gurgled mumbling and occasional nursery rhymes, are not even slightly scary regardless of if they’re played forward or in reverse. Sometimes Evy will decide to investigate one of the mysterious sounds more closely, burning minutes of precious screentime playing the same dead earworm over and over. No matter what foreboding secret messages may be hidden within these sounds, they remain the same.

Meanwhile, the podcast banter between Evy and Justin is immediately off-putting. Nina Kiri is fairly emotive in the film’s more intense moments, but Evy is such a grating personality that we can never fully latch onto her. It’s impossible to imagine people listening to a horror podcast where one person is forever stuck in the mode of “come on man, you’re so stupid, that isn’t real.” Perhaps they do, I wouldn’t know. The film acknowledges the staged nature of their interactions to some degree, with Evy and Justin continually refraining that they need to “get into character” whenever they become a little too freaked out from what they’re hearing, but we don’t see enough of Evy interacting with other people to know if she’s less insufferable in other scenarios.

Ian Tuason shows a bit of directorial promise during the film’s few offline horror setpieces. He and cinematographer Graham Beasley stage the slow crawls through the house well. Unsettling titled camera angles and eerily obscured figures in the darkness abound. The problem is that said figures never actually do anything. After a lengthy period of teasing and lore dumping, the film’s climax kicks into gear when our hosts listen to the final audio file. Evy stumbles around the house as overstimulating gobbledegook plays in her ears as the lights flicker, only for a very slight escalation to cap the film off. We’re not left with any memorably unsettling image that would cap off the eerie online stories that the film is so clearly trying to borrow from. Tuason is moving on from this to the next episode of the Paranormal Activity franchise. This seems like a good fit in theory but since that franchise only became faker and less likely to deliver with each installment, it is likely to indulge his worst impulses from this.

Undertone isn’t just underwhelming. It gives an entire medium a bad name. If this had really stirred me, perhaps I would’ve sought out some podcasts that would inspire the same feeling. Instead, I’m even more motivated to press *never play this* when I come across this type of thing on Spotify. If you’re the type of person who decides when you walk into the theater that you’re going to make noise and be scared when you go see a horror movie, Undertone may get the job done. Everyone else - press mute.

Movie Review: Lethargic Podcast Horror Flick “Undertone” Begs For 2X Speed