My last Kagi search before it began was “undertone movie jump scares.”

I had committed to seeing the film with virtually no information: “horror movie with really special audio” was the sum total of my knowledge when I AMC A-Listed a 10 PM (😭) Dolby Cinema screening, and a Letterboxd review from my friend Hubert told me that the horror was religious in nature. I found out it was an A24 release from the headlines on that Kagi search, but I didn’t learn anything more about the movie other than a general sense that it wasn’t going to be jumpy. And on the one hand: thank fucking god, because I hate jump scares.

We recently passed the 10-year-anniversary of one of my most scathing reviews, of a 2016 horror film called The Forest. It's not worth reading any more than the film was worth watching, but the thing to know is that the very bad film had competently executed “BOO” moments that got me every single fucking time even though I actually looked away from the screen during a bunch of them! Fuck that movie!

But on the other hand… a jump scare in the most jumpscare-heavy movie means that the jump scare is over. I hate the jump, but the worst part is the antici…

…

pation.

I've never seen a movie go as deep on the anticipation of a jump scare without release as undertone, which means it was one of the most stressful cinematic experiences I’ve ever had.

If we still lived in any sort of monoculture, I think it could have hit like Paranormal Activity did nearly two decades ago. Here is a(nother) low-budget supernatural spookfest set entirely in a house (writer/director Ian Tuason’s actual childhood home) featuring a tiny cast that pulls every bit of mileage it can from that. I loved that gimmicky marketing campaign; it was the first time I saw a horror movie in theaters. I cried from fear-stress. 

I didn’t cry at undertone, but I wasn’t far away. (I should probably cry more. I’ve heard it’s good for you.)

undertone’s real gimmick is the fact that it has only two onscreen actors in its entire runtime: Evy (Nina Kiri) and her comatose mother (Michèle Duquet). Everyone else exists entirely in voiceover. 

And, I mean, how else are you going to get into the head of a remote podcaster? Because that's what Evy is: co-host of The Undertone podcast, which pits Justin-the-believer (voice of Adam DiMarco) against Evy-the-skeptic. In a fun bit of marketing, the official website has recaps of episodes 6-13… though I’m kind of disappointed they didn’t actually record them (and ngl the fact that they only have a bakers dozen episodes does raise too many questions about the relative success of this project (this only occurs to me as I write this sentence and is absolutely not a movie problem)). This is absolutely not the sort of podcast I would listen to, but it feels like a podcast that someone would. 

Like, the production process feels impressively natural, particularly in the way you can’t really tell what part of it is going to be in the final recording and what is them talking or like pausing to look up information or whatever. You assume it’s everything and then someone will say “Alright, back to the recording” and I would think “Oh yeah, of course that wouldn’t be in the final show” but at the same time it would always throw me off a little bit (complimentary). 

It feels oddly voyeuristic to be getting the “raw” creation, which is interesting because there is absolutely a version of this horror movie that is voyeuristic (podcaster home invasion when (wait no that’s actually a really interesting idea (A24 call me))), but it’s not this one. 

Instead, we’re firmly in the James Wan school of supernatural spookery, but the reason I think undertone should be taught in schools is because it looks like a James Wan movie and absolutely does not act like a James Wan movie. Basically every single shot in this entire fucking movie is unsettling: when Evy is deep down the Google (boo) rabbit hole looking up something that Justin has mentioned, the camera frames her off the side leaving a giant gap of space for something fucked up to happen. Every cut is deliberate, obviously, but every cut here feels like it’s going to reveal some new Thing in the darkness around her. There are even shots where the camera just fucking spins around slowly. Hell: the movie does the mirror bathroom thing! She looking at herself, washes her face, opens the mirror, closes the mirror: I’ve seen this movie before, and there’s always some stupid dumb looking demon thing there and… nope.

It doesn’t come. And it keeps not coming and not coming and things do happen – at one point, I involuntarily said “Ah fuck” at a moment that turned out to be in the trailer (booo) – but so much less happens than you expect, which creates this overwhelming tension for basically the first 75 minutes of the movie while you’re really waiting for the true nature of the evil to be revealed. After it is… I dunno man, supernatural shit does not actually scare me that much, so those last ten minutes were the least stressful of the whole thing for me. And I don’t know how a second screening would feel now that I actually do know when and where things do and don’t happen.

But tbh that’s cope: I should have finished this as a “Hot Take” on Monday but it’s a “Review” on Friday because every evening after work when I tried to sit down and write I started freaking myself out again. I dunno man, I slept very badly after this showing, needing to watch a British girl complain about “Life of a Showgirl” for an hour before I could go to sleep with the lights on to pop mashups. undertone shit got under my skin in a way no movie has since Smile (shout out to the intro to my review: plausibly the best I ever made), and it has continued to be there. 

It’s genuinely exciting to see a movie be as effective as undertone is with as few resources as it had. I was honestly kinda surprised at the budget – reportedly $500,000 – but it reminded me of a Lonely Island quote I can’t for the life of me find, paraphrased to “When we were young and independent, we could make cool videos for like $100… but once people got involved, we had to spend $100,000 to make something as good. If it was just a handful of friends Making It Happen, virtually the exact same movie could be done for for $24K (which is how much Paranormal Activity cost adjusted for inflation), but not paying people properly and skipping out on things just to keep the budget down isn’t actually, like, “cool”? And so I’m glad they did it right… and also, apparently that the writer/director behind this has been tapped to direct the next Paranormal Activity?

That’s cute. Good job team.

8.3 / 10