UNDERTONE (2025)
Eh, this was ok. It’s about Evy, who lives in her mother’s house because the woman is terminally ill and mostly comatose. Evy doesn’t have much going on in her life. She’s on the outs with her boyfriend and doesn’t seem to have a job. What she does have is a horror-themed podcast with her online friend, Justin, called the “Undertone!” Justin receives an email with ten attached audio files, and they record their podcast and listen as a couple record increasingly strange things relating to sleep, children’s songs, and babies. The woman on the recordings mentions something about “Abyzou,” which leads Evy and Justin to the name of a demon that hates babies. Evy says the demon’s name, which apparently summons it as increasingly odd things occur in the house. Also, Evy is pregnant and contemplates aborting the fetus. For the climax, Evy and Justin listen to the final two recordings as people call in live. One dude purports to know the couple in the recording, a woman laughs at them and says that they shouldn’t have summoned her, and a final woman says that she’s about to kill her baby. Evy pleads with the woman and confesses that she killed her mother because she stopped praying with her. Everything goes crazy in Evy’s house as a TV turns on, the walls are covered with crude drawings of Abyzou, and her mother’s bed is empty. Mother suddenly appears in the bathroom and rushes at Evy. The screen goes black and Evy screams for a bit before there is silence.
I have a few thoughts:
The sound design was awesome. Evy puts on her headphones, and everything goes quiet. The sounds from the audio recordings are weird and creepy, a strange doll and loud banging and voices speaking backwards. Meanwhile, Evy thinks that there are noises in her own house, looking over her shoulder into the shadows, and we’re just as unsure as she is.
The film is definitely a slow burn. There are long lingering shots of Evy sitting at her computer, as the rest of the room is in shadows and we’re straining to see if there’s anything in the dark with her. There are some decent spooks. After the first podcast, Evy sees that a light is on in her mother’s room. Who did that? Later, the light in a closet behind Evy turns on, and she slams the door shut. She listens to a meditation track to try to fall asleep, but it becomes a nightmare. Some of these tricks become repetitive. We can only stare into a dark doorway so many times before we realize that nothing’s going to come out, and the effect loses its spookiness.
I liked the overall vibe, at first. There aren’t many podcast-themed horror movies. I can think of “Monolith” (2022), and maybe that’s it? However, the movie suffers from just too many threads. The podcasters can instantly google any topic, expending narrative time, sometimes to no great effect. The side plot about nursery rhymes doesn’t really go anywhere, except for being creepy, but we have to watch that digression for a while before the movie hones in the baby-hating demon. As for the ten audio recordings, they faded into insignificance toward parts nine and ten, maybe because the writers couldn’t think of anything truly horrifying to give them adequate weight. The movie just rushes past them in favor of the people calling into the podcast, and then the movie is done.
Overall, entertaining with a strong initial spooky atmosphere, but the plot couldn’t focus on a single central theme and suffered as a result.
