Evy hosts a podcast on eerie paranormal subjects. She’s the skeptic; her co-host Justin, based in London, is the believer, a la Scully and Mulder. She’s currently hosting from the house of her mother, who is unconscious in her deathbed upstairs, and for whom Evy is the sole caregiver.
We the viewers never leave that house during the brief running time of the Canadian horror picture undertone. Evy (Nina Kiri) and her mother are the only two people shown onscreen; Justin (Adam DiMarco) and the other characters are disembodied voices on the computer or the phone. On the podcast, she and Justin listen to a series of sound files he’s been sent from an unknown source.
These purport to be from a young couple, recorded so that the guy could prove to the woman that she talks in her sleep. It turns out that her overnight outbursts may be the invocation of a demon. Hearing all this, but not seeing it, gives the movie the flavor of an old-school scary radio play, like a supernaturally tinged Sorry, Wrong Number.
There’s no denying that undertone is creepy. It almost can’t not be creepy, as writer-director Ian Tuason employs venerable elements that work every time: children singing nursery rhymes, close-ups of religious art, human voices heard backwards. Tuason often places Evy on the far side of the screen, leaving a big space in the center that begs for something macabre to appear. It’s nerve-jangling.
What the movie lacks, perhaps, is a moment of revelation, where everything snaps together and the story adds up. It’s possible that I just didn’t get it, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what’s supposed to have happened at the end of undertone. This gap, for me at least, was about all that keeps the film from being declared a small classic.
It should be noted that Kiri gives an un-histrionic, touching performance. The movie is also a tacit advertisement for hospice care, because Evy’s Mom doesn’t have it. Caregiving for a loved one without help is horror enough.
