Critic Reviews

A medley of fears, anxieties, and regrets that repeatedly messes with the senses, it exists at the nexus of sanity and madness, life and death, Heaven and Hell, and sound and image.

Some will argue that all of the themes of “undertone” don’t connect, but that’s a feature, not a bug. This is a film that doesn’t feel the need to explain itself. Nightmares rarely do.

With undertone, Tuason has created one of the few horror films that’s even more horrifying to hear than it is to see.

undertone is so effectively spooky that I found my eyes nervously darting to shadows as I walked to my car after the screening. The best horror movies don't need cheap jumpscares, they just need to make you feel like something dreadful is out there, lurking, waiting to make itself heard.

It’s a properly scary movie, the kind that merits watching in a theater with a good sound system (or headphones in a dark room, at home). And “Undertone” provides terrific evidence of what a filmmaker can do even under constraint. The most powerful tool in an artist’s toolbox just might be the audience’s imagination.

It’s creepy as all get out and features a great performance from Nina Kiri, on-screen alone for most of the film, as a podcast host who has moved back to her childhood home to take care of her dying mother (Michèle Duquet). Things get weird.

After masterfully plotting the slow build of dread, the climax feels rushed and derivative of other, better horror movies. Yet moments in the climax do succeed; the explanation for that banging-on-pipes sound is unnerving.

As a theatrical experience, it’s lots of fun, making clever use of proven techniques that build tension before releasing it with exploding light bulbs and ghostly figures appearing in the corner of the frame.

In channeling his creative resources toward the sound of “Undertone,” Tuason conjures a lot out of a simple concept — a girl in a house. The marriage of this sound design to thoughtful, carefully placed camera movements makes for a horror film that’s a suspenseful slow burn.

The film works best when it is only Evy and her headphones on the screen, the character’s head (and ours) becoming overwhelmed by some truly impressive, singularly creepy sound design.