Undertone
Director: Ian Tuason
Cert: 15A
Genre: Horror
Starring: Nina Kiri, Adam DiMarco, Michèle Duquet, Keana Lyn Bastidas, Jeff Yung
Running Time: 1 hr 35 mins
At a moment when there are so many horror-themed podcasts, it’s only fair we should get a podcast-themed horror.
Debuting director Ian Tuason shot this nifty A24 chiller in his own childhood home, where he cared for both parents at the end of their lives.
That closeness to the material gifts the film some of its eeriest attributes: an overwhelming sense of being fatigued and frayed.
There are welcome echoes of Natalie Erika James’ adjacent-themed Relic, in which the filmmaker’s experience with a relative in late-stage Alzheimer’s shaped the haunted home in which the film is set.
Evy (Nina Kiri, doing a lot of heavy lifting) passes her nights recording a horror podcast with her long-distance co-host Justin (voiced by Adam DiMarco), slipping on noise-cancelling headphones to make workspace away from the sound of her dying mother’s laboured breathing upstairs.
Their format is X-Files gendered: she’s the sceptic versus his true believer. Until, that is, a batch of 10 audio files arrives, charting a dead couple’s apparent brush with something demonic. In an unsettling sequence of infant cries and distorted vocals, each clip swerves further away from urban myth towards the supernatural.
Warped Catholic iconography, including a supremely creepy statue of Filipino St Rita of Cascia (the patron of abuse survivors, violent marriages and lost causes), adds to the unease.
Tuason builds his film around sudden noises and the uncertainty of the partially glimpsed or unseen. The real stars of this clever one-location set-up are sound designer David Gertsman and mixer Jon Lawless, a team who manage to wring a jump-scare out of a dripping tap. Kiri gives a layered performance that foregrounds the strain that eclipses grief for a long-time carer. The coda veers into the conceptual chaos of weaker, later Paranormal Activity instalments, but it’s a promising start for the director’s proposed trilogy. Keep ’em coming.
In cinemas from Friday, April 10th