undertone

This is another one of those horror movies from this year that slipped under the radar. It had the backing of A24, but it never generated the same level of buzz as some of the studio horror films, and that's a shame, because I think this is one of the better horror movies I've seen this year. The setup is really interesting. The movie follows Evy, who co-hosts a paranormal podcast with her friend Justin. He's the believer, she's the skeptic, and their whole dynamic is built around him bringing in creepy videos, recordings, and stories from the internet while she tries to explain why none of it is actually supernatural. It's almost like an NPR-style podcast, very calm voices, very conversational, very low-key. For one episode, they receive a series of recordings made by a married couple. The wife had begun talking in her sleep and saying disturbing things, so her husband started recording what was happening, and the deeper the recordings go, the stranger they get. That's all I'll say about where that thread leads. Evy is listening to these recordings while she's alone in her childhood home taking care of her mother, who's in a coma. Because Justin is in Europe, they have to record the podcast in the middle of the night to make the time difference work. So she's sitting by herself in a dark house, headphones on, listening to this increasingly disturbing audio while her mother lies upstairs, and the movie wrings an unbelievable amount of dread out of that simple situation. That's what I loved about this movie. It's basically a chamber piece. Most of it is just one woman sitting in a dark room talking quietly into a microphone, listening to audio, and reacting to what she hears. It shouldn't work, and it absolutely does, because this movie understands that what you hear can be scarier than what you see. It doesn't constantly jump out and scare you. It lets you sit there with Evy. You start questioning what's real right around the time she does. Since she's the skeptic, she keeps trying to rationalize everything, and you're right there with her wondering what your own breaking point would be, at what point you'd stop listening, at what point you'd decide something supernatural was actually happening. In a way it reminded me a little of The Ring. Every time she continues to another recording, she's making a conscious decision to keep going even though she knows something is wrong, and you keep asking yourself whether you would. What really got to me was how relatable the setting is. Everybody has been alone in a quiet house at night, heard something they couldn't immediately explain, and had that moment of wondering whether they actually heard it or their mind was playing tricks on them. This movie lives in that feeling. It doesn't rely on elaborate monsters or huge special effects, just sound, silence, darkness, and your own imagination. I honestly found it more disturbing than a lot of the bigger horror movies this year. Outside of Obsession, this may have been the horror movie that stayed with me the longest afterward. It's one of those movies where you almost want to leave a light on after you get home. Nina Kiri does a really good job carrying almost the entire movie by herself. Adam DiMarco is really only a voice for most of the film, but he works well as the believer to her skeptic, and their chemistry keeps the podcast feeling authentic even though they're never in the same room together. I also think people who are already into paranormal podcasts, true-crime podcasts, or found-footage horror are going to get even more out of this than I did. The movie understands why people like sitting in the dark listening to creepy stories, and then it turns that experience into the horror movie itself. You're never quite sure where it's going until you get there, and I appreciated that. If you're a horror fan, I definitely recommend it, just not in the middle of the afternoon. Watch it alone, in the dark, and I think it'll hit a lot different.