It seems there’s a new film marketed with histrionic pull quotes every other month, calling it the “scariest movie ever.” The latest of these is “undertone,” an audio-centric horror-thriller released by A24. It combines classic horror tropes like scary old lady, scary Jesus, scary closet, scary bathroom, scary clock, scary TV, scary nursery rhyme and of course, scary headphones. The film was written and directed by Ian Tuason, who proves himself a capable visual stylist and an absolutely terrible screenwriter.
The movie is about a skeptical young woman named Evy, who co-hosts a paranormal podcast while caring for her ailing mother, who is very ill and very Catholic. We learn in excruciatingly stilted dialogue that Evy is herself a lapsed Catholic with a strained marriage and a growing fear that she may be pregnant.
Evy and her mother are the only two characters who ever actually appear on screen. The rest, like Evy’s podcast co-host Justin and a visiting nurse, are either only heard over the phone or from off-screen. It’s an interesting choice, but it really serves to emphasize the considerable limitations of the performances and the dialogue’s blunt obviousness.
Justin is the worst offender here — Adam DiMarco’s voice performance feels like something out of a student film thrown together in a weekend, and most of his dialogue consists of either explaining what’s going on in the scary voice recordings he and Evy are listening to or dispassionately stating facts about his co-host’s past.
The aforementioned voice recordings are kind of effective — they’re full of creepy sounds and inexplicable occurrences — but they don’t really go anywhere for most of the movie. It feels less like a build-up to the film’s climax than it does like wheel-spinning to drag the story out to feature length.
The eventual climax is just baffling. It’s not really scary, because it’s so all over the place, combining images and ideas from so many disparate threads that have appeared throughout the movie, including some that seemed totally inconsequential at first and don’t really intersect meaningfully with anything else.
This lack of focus is, I think, the movie’s fatal flaw. There are plenty of compelling visual and sonic choices, but the film is so plot-heavy that it can’t overcome the fact that its narrative is a total mess. It’s hard for a movie to be the scariest one ever if you’re never quite sure what’s supposed to be scaring you.
