Undertone (2025) - 6/10

Evy (Nina Kiri) is living at home, filled with religious iconography, caring for her bedridden, dying mother, whilst recording a horror podcast, called the Undertone, with her co-host, Justin (Adam DiMarco). They get sent an anonymous email to the show, with some recordings attached. Mysteriously cryptic stuff, perfect content. It’s tense and creepy as they listen to nursery rhymes played in reverse and dig themselves into a murky world of conspiracy, audio file by file. Justin is the believer, feeding the narrative of the recordings with folklore stories. Evy is the skeptic. She’s our focus, we’re in the room with only her as she records her side of the show in the dead of night, but there’s something eerie going on in her house with her comatose Mama (Michèle Duquet). Her world slowly appearing to echo the events from the emailed recordings. It’s slow and deliberate. The camera only showing the bare minimum, the emphasis instead put on the sound, a mix of foreboding foley and suspenseful score as we fill in the visual blanks. The sound is important. Evy is alone in the house with her mum, but strange things are happening off camera and it’s sound that leads the way. It’s laced with tropes, but builds very effectively, from darkly creepy to genuinely disturbing. Granted it’s far from perfect and loses its way, but there’s something intriguing here, Kiri is great, the sound is magnificent and the whole production is pretty slick. A good and gripping modern horror.

6/10