Fear the Silence: Review of "The Undertone" — An A24 Chamber Horror About Podcasts and Demons
There are horrors that rely on jolting images. Some weaponize music. "The Undertone" chooses silence as its blunt instrument. At a certain point in the film you stop scanning the frame and begin scanning the room you’re in. No obvious monster; probably nothing there. Still, your brain keeps rehearsing possibilities.
The Undertone (2025)
Original title: The Undertone
Country: Canada
Director: Ian Twason
Starring: Nina Kiri, Adam DiMarco, Michelle Duke
Genre: horror
Premiere: April 30, 2026 (Russia)
Rating: 18+
Score: IMDb — 6.4 / Kinopoisk — 5.6 / Letterboxd — 3.0
Podcast, Creepypasta, and Anonymous Recordings
Evie (Kiri) runs a paranormal podcast where she plays the skeptical foil and Justin (DiMarco) supplies the credulous counterpoint. They unpack fears—often with dry jokes and a measured tone—which explains their listenership. Evie comes back home to care for her dying mother; the world of the show suddenly compresses to one apartment, one laptop. Then an anonymous message lands in their inbox: ten audio files of a husband trying to capture his wife's bizarre nocturnal utterances. At first it reads like a run-of-the-mill creepypasta, then it turns inward — personal, disquieting, harder to dismiss. (Side note: the podcast framing makes the film feel like a found-audio project updated for streaming-era paranoia, e.g., the way intimacy and detachment coexist.)
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Sound as a Driving Force
Twason trims the cast down to two bodies on screen: Evie and her mother. Everyone else is a voice. That’s not thrift disguised as necessity; it’s deliberate constraint. He shot in his childhood home on a $500,000 budget and opted for limits that sharpen rather than hem in the film. Think less spectacle, more suggestion — a decision reminiscent of "The Babadook" where a single prop can carry a lot of psychic freight. The cross on the wall becomes a prompt; your imagination fills in the rest.
Sound designers David Gertsman and John Lawless assemble an aural menace from tiny, everyday noises: nursery rhymes reversed, breath pressed to a door, a leaking tap. These elements are used with surgical timing to produce jolts and to let the listener's mind do the worst work. In practice, "The Undertone" asks for low light and decent headphones (i.e., not your phone speaker). Under those conditions it functions like an audio drama pressed directly into your skull — immersive and, at times, quietly brutal.
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Demon, Madonna, and Catholic Guilt
On the surface the plot nods to a folkloric fiend: Abizu, a being blamed in some tales for miscarriages and for driving mothers toward monstrous acts out of envy. Scratch the surface and the movie becomes less about mythology and more about conscience. Evie was raised Catholic; she shoved a statue of the Virgin Mary into a closet years ago — not ceremonially destroyed, just tucked away like an awkward relic. The statue keeps reappearing. Is that supernatural interference, or the psyche nagging the culpable self? The film resists a single answer and that's its strength. It lingers in the uncomfortable space where ritual, memory, and regret overlap, and it leaves you with impressions rather than tidy explanations.