Undertone Review

“Don't be afraid of the dark. Be afraid of the silence.” – Justin

Sometimes, things work out. Sometimes, they don’t. The plan was that double billing The Mummy and Undertone would make for a great evening at the multiplex. After all, as I mentioned in my Mummy review (click here for that) I’m a pre-sold sucker for Mummy movies. And Undertone just seemed to be an understated epic of creepiness. A good evening for us horror fans, right?

Yeah, sometimes, things work out. Sometimes they don’t.

This movie had (on paper at least, and in its opening setup) everything in place to hook me and reel me right in. Fish in a barrel is the saying that springs to mind. Easy pickings.

Even the style of the film – the focus is on a single cast member who carries the whole movie – is one I usually enjoy. The last kind of similarly styled film that I really enjoyed was last year’s Good Boy. (And that was a dog and his human.)

Nina Kiri is front and centre in this one as Evie. Evie lives with her mother, who is bed ridden and unconscious. Seemingly, as she never leaves the house, her only communication is with Justin with whom she co-hosts a podcast about the supernatural, the unexplained and the downright creepy. So, at this point I’m fully invested. I can identify with the character being the co-host of a podcast myself. (All episodes of Piercing the Veil are available at this link, new episodes drop on the last Friday of every month, folks!!)

The podcast is recorded in the very early hours of the morning, so as Justin isn’t there with her, there’s just Evie, in a pool of light cast by her desk lamp. Perfect setting – right? The claustrophobia and isolation are subtly ramped right up. As she’s surrounded by darkness, add vulnerability to that as well. I really can’t fault the set-up here. (As a point of trivia, I’ll thrown in the fact that the movie was actually filmed in writer/director Ian Tuason’s childhood home.)

During the recording of an episode, Justin tells Evie that he has received ten sound files from an anonymous source, and these files are recordings of something eerie. Maybe paranormal. So, they listen.

In their roles on the podcast, Justin is the believer and Evie is the sceptic who tries to debunk everything – but as they start to listed to the recordings one by one, over a number of evenings, the contents are increasingly disturbing. Starting as a woman apparently talking in her sleep, to sleepwalking, to speaking backwards, chanting childhood songs like Ba Ba Black Sheep.

We were half an hour into the 93-minute film when I realised that despite feeling tense and uneasy in my seat, waiting for the inevitable hammer to drop via a jump scare, it wasn’t happening. Unfortunately, this is my boredom point. Patience begins to wear thin, and the chances of the film really grabbing me diminish every subsequent minute. Moreso if the director cues me into believing that a jump scare is unavoidable.

Director Tuason had a habit of showing Evie in a wide shot, in her pool of light at the desk, with the left half of the screen, the part of the shot that showed the bottom of the stair, in darkness. I wasn’t sure if anything was supposed to be shown there, but due to the darkness – we couldn’t make it out. (The is actually a thing – films like Alien: Romulus have been screened too dark in cinemas so we’ve missed details that we haven’t seen until the blu-ray release a couple of months later – and the whole tone of the film has consequently changed for the better. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to have been the case here.)

By the end of the hour, we’ve seen some nice, atmospheric shots, some needlessly angled tilts of the camera, and we’re now aware the chants on the recordings are summoning the demon Abyzou, who according to folklore is said to cause miscarriages, and Evie is six weeks pregnant – surely SOMETHING has to happen – right?

Nope. By the end of the final third, whatever happens is conveyed to the audience as a series of sound effects on a totally black screen. We get an hour and a half that’s densely packed with atmosphere and menace, shocks that are built up but never actually happen – and no payoff.

Worse, I gather that this is the first in a proposed trilogy by Tuason. Okay, buddy. Good luck with those. I won’t be watching.

Rob Rating = 2