An unfathomable sense of isolation underlines Ian Tuason’s feature debut, the audio-driven horror smorgasbord “Undertones.” The film, which follows a weary horror podcast host as he watches his mother die, is initially frightening, with a pulsating undercurrent of sadness expressed with delicacy and deftness. Although it ultimately leans toward traditional genre characteristics, its introductory musings are novel, taking the form of a one-woman performance showcase that deftly utilizes visual and auditory negative space.
Sound is an important tool in Tuazon’s films, which begin with a children’s lullaby interspersed with the labored breathing of a dying woman. The cycle of life is laid out even before we meet the protagonist, a young and troubled woman named Evi Babic (Nina Kyri), who patiently waits for her comatose mother (Michel Duque) to die in her sleep. This story is drawn from the director’s own experience caring for his elderly parents. Evie also hosts a 3 a.m. podcast recording from Tuason’s unstable suburban Toronto mansion where she spent her childhood. Evie coordinates with London’s kind-hearted co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco), one of several characters whose voices are heard but never seen.
On “Undertone,” the very concept of existence transcends the physical, depicting not only clever sound design but also gestures toward the spiritual and, ultimately, the demonic. Evie and Justin’s show, Undertones, focuses on urban legends, and the latest episode concerns a series of strange audio files sent to her by an anonymous source of a husband and his wife talking in their sleep, which gradually begin to reflect Evie’s growing anxiety. This is an acoustic version of found footage.
The core of Evie and Justin’s co-host dynamic involves Justin playing the devout believer and Evie the skeptic, but her domestic predicaments begin to disrupt the status quo. Often sitting by her mother’s bedside looking for answers, she seems to regret turning her back on religion (her home is filled with Christian iconography). As a result, Evie, who falls into a state of insomnia, searches for clues in audio recordings and nursery rhymes, plays them backwards, and desperately writes down the hidden messages she finds.
Every time Evy sits down to record in her dark living room, she puts noise-canceling headphones over her ears. As a result, the texture of the soundscape changes significantly, and her image becomes isolated in the process. While calls and eerie recordings with Justin dominate the soundtrack, Tuason’s camera remains fixed on close-ups or wide shots of Evie for long periods of time, and our gaze drifts around the screen. In these moments, cinematographer Graham Beasley makes great use of light, shadow, and stillness, keeping our gaze moving back and forth between the characters and their dark surroundings without doing anything.
At times, gradual zooms and pans across the space invite anticipation as the recording becomes more ominous (as do the mysterious crashing sounds coming from the top of the stairs, or the lights mysteriously turning on in the bedroom). As the silence and emptiness begin to be filled with shadowy figures, we find ourselves agonizing over Evie’s safety and mental state, especially when she starts drinking again to cope with stress. However, the accumulation of these technologies has an expiration date. There are only so many times something creepy can happen without Evie noticing, and only a limited number of instances where a movie can reveal that something creepy was a dream sequence or hard-cut before moving on to the next day before the audience gets irritated and impatient.
Some are horrifying, some are startling, and while “Undertones” starts off as the former, its fears are real and unsettling thanks to the imminence of death, it ends up using the latter as a crutch. Before long, its unique setting and aesthetic approach give way to everything even a half-hearted horror fan has likely seen hundreds of times before, from creepy crayon sketches to paranoid montages of occult research to an all-out demonic presence from ancient folklore that may or may not be involved in things. The film is at its strongest when Midnight deals with spiritual and emotional mysteries, driven by Kili’s fearlessly troubled performance as he slowly turns inward. The emotional underpinnings of this story, so to speak, are much more impactful when they’re not caught up in cheap thrills. It only serves as an opaque filter for the story of a woman confronting the horrors that will ultimately come upon us all.
The change in direction from such an austere drama made with gruesome audiovisual dexterity quickly deflates the room as the film’s technical acumen is channeled into something entirely rote and familiar. But regardless of how things end up, Tuazon proves himself to be a skilled enough tonal tinkerer at times, and marks a notable arrival in the world of independent tech horror. At the very least, “Undertone” might be a promise of even bigger things to come.
