Movie Review: "Undertone" (2026)
Undertone Movie Review
Written by Stuart D. Monroe
Released by A24 Films
Written and Directed by Ian Tuason
2026, 93 minutes, Rated R
Released on March 13th, 2026
Starring:
Nina Kiri as Evy
Michèle Duquet as Mama
Adam DiMarco as Justin (voice)
Keana Lyn Bastidas as Jessa (voice)
Jeff Yung as Mike (voice)
Review:
I must say the word of mouth going into Undertone was getting so strong that it concerned me a bit in that way where you start to feel there’s no way it can be that good. So, you temper your expectations. And I’m glad I did- I enjoyed Undertone much more because I wiped any hype from my brain and just took the auditory ride.
Evy (Nina Kiri; The Handmaid’s Tale) is a podcaster who is caring for her dying mother in her very last days. She hasn’t had anything to eat or drink in days, and she is winding down to death. Evy distracts herself from the deathwatch by recording her spooky/paranormal podcast (called “The Undertone”) with her partner, Justin (Adam DiMarco; The White Lotus). It’s a bleak and frankly depressing scenario until an anonymous email arrives with a total of ten attached audio files.
The recordings are progressively more terrifying clips documenting the haunting/possession of a couple named Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas; The Hardy Boys) and Mike (Jeff Yung; Avatar: The Last Airbender). It starts with sleepwalking and rapidly worsens as Evy and Justin work their way toward recording number ten.
I called Undertone an “auditory ride” because the overwhelming majority of dramatic tension, scares, and shocks are heard rather than seen. In fact, very little is ever seen in Undertone except for a handful of admittedly effective background specters and surprise movements from Mama (Michèle Duquet; Three Men and a Baby). It’s not that there are no visceral scares; they’re just few and far between.
Lest I sound like I’m running Undertone into the ground, allow me to say that the sound design is borderline groundbreaking. The recordings are creepy as fuck and play out in such a way that they’re fairly easy to visualize. There are numerous playbacks as audio is cleaned up and hidden voices are revealed in terrifying fashion.
Then there’s the songs. Children’s songs and rhymes often have a dark history, and Undertone capitalizes on their inherent, repetitive creepiness to ratchet up the tension with very little mercy. The songs are played backwards and at various speeds as the tale of a child-hungry demon unfolds. The mythology built around the demon, Abyzou, is more than a tad underdeveloped but still a great hook nonetheless. It’s a story that kinda begs to be explored further.
Writer/director Ian Tuason starts inserting some more exposition around the halfway mark that attempts to give stronger characterization to the fairly bland Evy (who, to be fair, is supposed to be the skeptic of the two hosts). It kind of backfires by taking the focus away from the very simplicity of the premise while not really leading anywhere.
Still, what Undertone does well, it does goddamn well. There are blackout scenes (one extended) that had the theater extremely unsettled. It’s an impressive feat to freak out a packed theater with pure audio in a packed house. It’s the kind of stuff made for the theater and was a memorable experience. In that way, it’s classic A24 to the point of even being a tad derivative of other works- that classic slow burn that just keeps building and building to the point where your nerves are getting shredded before launching into a batshit crazy finish. And while Undertone doesn’t entirely stick the landing, it still deserves some love for intensity if nothing else.
Undertone is the kind of film that definitely won’t land for everyone (the slow burn drives a certain percentage of fans insane, after all), but it still makes a unique mark on the genre. I dare say that Undertone may even start a bit of an auditory horror trend, as it proves that the soil to be mined there is rich indeed.
Grade:
3.5 out of 5.0 stars
