Undertone

I’ve seen it said that we’re currently living through a golden age of horror movies. I don’t know if I’d agree with that, but I do think we’re living in a golden age of horror movie marketing. After Longlegs garnered a lot of (mostly undeserved) hype via its genius marketing campaign, it seems like every studio is dropping cryptic ARG-esque snippets on social media weeks before the actual trailer comes out.

For example, A24’s Undertone, a movie that seems like it was made solely to harvest eye-catching images and audio clips.

The premise: Evy is a young woman who’s moved into her mother’s creepy boomer house to care for her on her deathbed. She makes her living running the titular Undertone podcast with her best friend, in which they discuss spooky paranormal topics sent in by readers. When they get a strange email containing ten audio files, they decide to listen to them one by one over the course of multiple recording sessions; predictably, strange things start happening.

This is a premise that speaks to me on a deep level, as someone who listens to/watches a lot of “true” paranormal content and who has a deep love of digital horror. An artsy A24 film about something sinister lurking in the waveforms of a cursed podcast? Sign me up.

Unfortunately, you don’t actually get much of that in Undertone. What you do get is A DEMON NAMED ZABZUBZUU WHO EATS CHILDREN, HERE’S AN OLD-TIMEY DRAWING OF THE DEMON ON GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH AND SOME HOARY OLD RELIGIOUS HORROR IMAGERY A-BOOGA-BOOGA ISN’T THIS SO SCARY

Sorry. Got a little worked up there.

I am just sick to death of every horror premise boiling down to either “it’s a demon” or “it’s a witch” (I’ll fucking get to you eventually, Weapons) or “it’s a demon summoned by a witch.” To me, a nameless, completely inexplicable supernatural force is far more frightening, and far more interesting, than a known category of Halloween monster, especially when you give it a stupid name like Abzuzu. (I’m only barely exaggerating the demon’s name for comedic effect, by the way). If the movie had been about some unknowable entity lurking within the sound files, I would have been far more willing to put up with its other flaws, of which there are many. But an evil demon that does evil stuff because it’s evil and therefore it likes doing evil things? Fucking snooze.

Unfortunately, that’s far from Undertone’s only major problem. The movie makes a lot of odd creative half-steps that turn what could have been strengths into unforced weaknesses. For example: the entire thing takes place entirely with the confines of Evy’s mother’s house, they’re the only two characters we ever see physically on-screen (except for a one-second maybe-hallucination, anyway), even the house’s windows are covered in lacy curtains so that we never see the outside world. That suggests the movie is going for a claustrophobic, one-location horror vibe, a format I happen to greatly enjoy. I actually thought initially that the whole story was going to take place over the course of a single nocturnal podcast session. But it doesn’t commit to this decision: days pass, the sun comes up, Evy leaves the house. Instead of being claustrophobic, this leaves the movie feeling merely constrained and small. Similarly, there’s a twist late in the story (depending on how you interpret certain imagery anyway), but the movie glides past it so quickly, and it has such little impact on the plot, that it only serves to make the overall story feel muddled.

With no other on-screen characters to bounce off of, and even those characters Evy speaks to by phone not actually showing up as often as you’d think, we’re left with endless scenes of our protagonist speaking into a microphone, listening to audio files, and creeping around the house, all while the camera lingers on open doorways and shadowy recesses. The movie is obviously trying to conjure the same paranoia of the fourth wall that Longlegs did, but the effort completely falls flat and thus what should be tense ends up being boring. A movie predicated mostly on scary audio would seem to lend itself to a lot of jump scares; there are actually very few here, but I almost wish there were more. At least that might have made it more entertaining.

Frustratingly, after a sagging middle that takes up most of the movie, Evy and her gay best friend (I can’t remember his name, nor can I be bothered to look it up) start getting calls from listeners, a narrative element that opens up the story and adds in some much-needed dynamism… right before the climax, far too late to actually help. This is another strange creative choice that leaves the whole thing feeling severely underdeveloped, as though the screenplay was given one draft and then never revised.

Undertone operates thematically as though it’s trying to check off a list of recent overplayed horror tropes (Pregnancy horror! Religious horror! Motherhood horror! Generational trauma horror!). This scattershot approach would leave the movie feeling incoherent even if it had time to actually say anything about any of the themes, but as it is, it brings them up just long enough to call them to the viewer’s attention, but not long enough to do anything meaningful with them.

The nature of the plot leaves the main actress carrying a lot of weight, and… I don’t think she was up to the task. Her performance during the emotional scenes isn’t convincing, and during the podcast sessions neither her nor her co-host speak the way people recording a podcast do. This latter point makes the exposition scenes, where they’re breathlessly recounting absurd stories about possessed mothers killing their babies, unintentionally comical.

So if the script, pacing, themes, characters and acting are all bad, is there anything good about Undertone?

Sure, to an extent. I did find the narrative unfolding across the ten files engaging, like an audio-only version of Paranormal Activity, even if it doesn’t go anywhere interesting. There’s a scene with Evy listening to a meditation app that’s effectively eerie. The movie generally looks nice. The ambiguity of what happens in the climax and ending leaves ample scope for interpretation, although the whole thing is such a snooze-fest, I don’t know why you’d bother.

Ultimately, Undertone left me completely cold in a way that few horror movies in recent years have. A movie that’s just bad washes over me; a movie that was clearly trying to do something interesting, but fails at it, sticks in my mind like a fork in an electrical socket. I’m going to need A24, Neon, and whoever else wants to get on the “elevated horror” train to spend less time on the marketing campaigns and more time acquiring a well-written script.

Meanwhile, if you want to experience whatever good Undertone has to offer, save your time and money and watch the trailers.