JONESING FOR FILMS

Film has always been a visual medium, but it was forever altered with the invention of sound about a hundred years ago. Every once in a while, the soundscape of a movie is as important or more important than anything else in the movie. Director Ian Tuason’s debut film undertone falls into that category.

Evy (Nina Kiri) is a podcaster taking care of her bed-ridden mother who is dying and in the last few days of life. Her podcasting co-host is across the pond in England and they record “The Undertone” late at night where Evy lives. It is a paranormal podcast where they review creepy audio, with Evy being the skeptic of the duo and Justin more willing to believe. For their latest episode, Justin starts playing a series of ten audio clips sent to them anonymously, which coincides with increasingly strange happenings around Evy and her ailing mother.

From the very beginning, the film’s is laser-focused on the sound department. Evy quietly sings the old children’s nursey rhyme “Baa Baa Black Sheep” bedside to her mother over her mother’s labored breathing. After saying goodnight to her mother, she walks downstairs to the boiling tea kettle on the stove and then sits down to her laptop on the dining room table. All of this serves to orient the audience audibly to the layout of the house. And when she puts her headphones on to record her podcast, it shuts out all outside noise to the audience too.

With the exception of her mother, Evy is really the only character seen on screen; everyone else appears via phone or online audio calls. This means that Nina Kiri, visually, is the locus of the audience’s attention. However, the focus on the camera is rarely just on her.

The camera is very still for the majority of this film, and because it is just one person most of the time on camera, your eyes are prone to wander. And this feels deliberate, because there are several shots where the camera is looking into the dining room at Evy sitting at her laptop, but this only occupies the right side of the screen. On the left is the empty hallway behind the dining room wall that leads to the kitchen and the stairs that go upstairs.

One particularly great moment has Evy at the dining table, earphones on and talking to Justin and listening, and the camera slowly moves in on her. Eventually, it becomes evident that the camera is not zooming in on her, but beyond her, to the empty space past her right shoulder, like a presence that Evy and the audience cannot see, but the camera is indicating that there nevertheless is something there, lurking on the periphery.

Very early on, I caught myself looking at the empty spaces behind and around Evy, like the film was training my brain to pay attention to the periphery. This reminded me of another film that did that to me, It Follows, and, similarly, I found myself paying more attention to my surroundings after leaving the theater. One of my purest joys of watching movies is finding the rare gems that put you on their wavelength and stick with you when the movie is over.

With the stillness of the film and the reliance on soundscape, there is a balancing act that movies like this have, which can be difficult and feels entirely like shifting sand for the movie and the audience. How much do you withhold from the audience? How opaque do you make your film? Sometimes, personally, a movie can reveal too little and feel like it is manipulating me or doesn’t have the goods and wants me to think it is smarter than it really is. I think undertone gets the balance just right, dangling enough clues to increase the dread throuhgout.

Given that Evy is basically the only conscious character who appears in the movie, that makes it a heavy lift for the actor in that position, and Nina Kiri is completely captivating in keeping the audience riveted. There are ten audio files that she and her co-host Justin are working through, and with each file, the expression on her face gets more and more scared and unsettled by what they hear. If there is one aspect of the film that I found to be a slight hang up for me, it is that Evy’s continually voiced skepticism is clearly betrayed by her facial expressions while listening to the audio clips. And her “save it for the pod” ethos hews a little too closely to Heather’s insistence on carrying on at any cost in The Blair Witch Project.

The nursery rhyme that Evy sings to her mother and a few others, tie into the paranormal that Evy and Justin experience more and more. I’m not sure how many people realize that the origins of a shocking number of nursery rhymes have some unsettling and disturbing origins in myth and folklore; for instance, “Ring Around the Rosie” is allegedly about the Black Death. Putting these origins into the pot with some supernatural folklore, the possibility of demonic possession or haunting, along with backwards messages and that mixture creates a potently eerie concoction.

There is a strong tradition of various items or forms of media in horror films being haunted or cursed, and this movie draws from movie in that vein like The Ring, The Babadook, and even Pontypool, but it also draws from the tradition of some found footage horror like the aforementioned The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity.

I went into undertone mostly blind (or, is deaf more appropriate?). I had seen no trailers for it, just some positive word of mouth online. Add my voice to that positive word of mouth, because undertone is haunting and engrossing, using its still camerawork and rich soundscape to draw you in to its web.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars