A24 told people Undertone (2026) is the scariest movie you will ever hear, and I took it for a spin tonight, whats why the late psot for my regular scheduel, took it with that pitch already lodged in my brain, which is a tough place to start because very few movies can actually make that claim and actually cash out, but I end up spending the first half watching the movie and half arguing with the marketing in your head like this is bs. The setup is this woman named Evy, short for Evangeline, she is back home taking care of her dying mother who just lays in bed without speaking taht much during the entire movie, and Evy is stuck in this suffocating house doing all the caretaking by herself while her only real company is her podcast co host Justin, who calls in remotely from London while she runs the recordings from her side. The movie opens with Evy going through a batch of audio files sent to them by some stranger and she is doing this live during a podcast recording while Justin listens in over the phone, the two of them fumbling through tracks and reversing audio until they start picking up something strange buried inside the recordings, you probably getting the idea, this random guy let loose a demon on them through the internet? like wtf of a crazy concept but fine Im down with it. Justin is remote the entire movie, you never actually see him on screen, so it is not two people sitting together in the dark doing this, it is Evy alone in that house at night with Justin as just a voice in her ear, and the isolation that creates is probably the most effective thing the movie does because you feel how completely alone she really is in there.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt35892608/
- Platform: PRIME VIDEO
The sound design is the thing that actually hooks you and keeps you watching past the first thirty minutes, because they do some dope things with reversed audio and layered voices that start to feel like they are coming from inside the walls around you rather than out of the speakers, btw to get the best out of this movie you got to watch with headphones. The recordings were made by a couple named Mike and Jessa, and what starts as pretty mundane late night audio of Jessa talking in her sleep slowly turns into something unsettling when Evy and Justin start reversing certain tracks and realize she has been saying something, something that when flipped around turns out to be an invitation to a demon named Abyzou and that is where the movie starts to get its claws out. Abyzou comes from real folklore, she is this female demon from Mediterranean and European mythology connected to miscarriages and infant death, a creature driven by her own infertility to target pregnant women and mothers, and the movie layers that mythology into the recordings in a way that lands so damn perfect because it ties back to what Evy is personally going through at home, not her mom. The reveal that Evy is six weeks pregnant while all of this is happening gives the whole thing a very personal touch that the movie clearly wants as its emotional ractor to keep pumping fear and dopamine through your body, at the same time a vulnerability that the demon can exploit and on paper that is a very smart move because it connects the external supernatural threat directly to the most intimate and frightening part of her life. There is also a moment where Evy finds a small religious figurine in her mother's nightstand alongside some disturbing drawings and that discovery is supposed to be the pivot where her skepticism starts cracking, she starts feeling there is something off and the actress Nina Kiri sells it with just her face and body language because that is all she has got to work with given how stripped down the whole movie is, I have always said that few characters in small spaces are some of the most difficult movies to make, I can only remember one that really pull it off that was "127 (2010)".
You know from the tittle that not everything is pink and rainbows for this movie so here is my argument on where things start to fall apart though, because the middle section of this movie is a long exhausting set of scenes of Evy walking from room to room in a dim cramped house while Justin clicks through audio files over the phone and the pacing just completely loses its footing, but I get it there is not much to do with basically a single character. You get distorted nursery rhymes slowed down and run through reverb, you get floorboards creaking and lights flickering, you get Justin losing his cool every five minutes while Evy tries to hold the episode together for their listeners and none of it escalates at a pace that actually builds dread because the movie keeps cycling through the same set of sounds without giving you anything new to look at. The story tries to add weight through Evy's guilt about her mother and been pregnant, she feels so unconfortable about it the entire time and those are interesting threads no doubt but they had to take advantage of them and constantly, but they never fully connect to the supernatural threat in a way that feels earned, for the most part it feels like a must without asking permission and they just kind of sit beside it. The recordings reveal more about what Mike and Jessa went through and the circumstances that surrounded them, and you start getting calls from other listeners during the live recording that hint at how wide the reach of Abyzou actually goes, which is a creepy idea, but the execution keeps running out of momentum right when it needs to push forward. Justin is loud and over the top as a remote presence and you can feel Evy getting worn down by him, which is realistic I guess, but it does not make for a great time when you are listening to him yell about how this is going to be their biggest episode and you are already an hour in and still waiting for something to actually happen, well now that I think about it at least the movie does make you feel sad for Evy and mad about how Justin is been at her, the whole thing starts to feel like a podcast you are not quite interested but is the drama between this two that at least keeps you watching.
This kind of setup, one location, one actress, sound as the delivery system for dread, makes you think about other similar movies like Relic, movies that use space and atmosphere to make you feel without seen too many characters, they try hard with the sound to do the heavy lifting, so I guess its just hard to pull of without relying on visible monsters or traditional jump sequences. Undertone clearly wants to exist in that same category and the idea is good because there is real untapped potential in a horror movie built entirely around audio, sound is deeply primal and the right movie could absolutely make that work at a high level. But where something like Hereditary or even The Black Phone used sound as one tool inside a larger landscape with multiple characters, although the scene at the basement on Black Phone where Finney is trapped the entire time there are multiple shots of him alone, phone rings, a voice on the other side. Undertone puts sound in the driver seat without enough story context to keep things going strong and after a while you start to feel the gap between what the concept promises and what the end product actually delivers. The Abyzou mythology is interesting and I went down a pretty deep rabbit hole on it after watching because the story around her is way more disturbing than anything the movie shows you and that gap between what you find when you Google it and what the movie gives you is telling for a demon with that much history and symbolism deserved a way better script to exploit all that context.
I wanted to like this more than I did, its not the scariest same as it not the worst, and part of what makes it frustrating is that the pieces were all sitting right there, a good performance by Nina Kiri, a very very creepy mythological foundation as the backstory for a mythological demon, sound design that has real teeth in the right moments and the kind of single location that forces a movie to earn its scares through craft rather, pure acting and directing without the need of a big budget, most of the time where good small budget movies shine. But with the pacing is all over the place and the story never quite figures out how to turn the pressure into something that can be sustained throught he movie, it spikes and then falls flat, over and over, and as the movie gets closer to the end it shifts into something that actually resembles supernatural chaos inside that house you have been waiting so long that it just feels rushed or almost obligated to happen certain way. Im not going to drop the ending just like that but its very ambigous to say the least, I can understand its suppose to be like that by design to make you want more about it, it rather feels like they ran out of time or script. I am giving it a 7/10 because the cool concept and some real moments of effective sound horror are not enough to cover for how much dead air there is between them, and A24 calling this the scariest movie you will ever hear is not doing them any favors because that kind of hype creates expectations that this movie simply cannot cash, Im desappointed on them for this type of marketing honestly.
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