Curses! Foiled again!
The debut of Canadian filmmaker Ian Tuason, Undertone is unsettling entertainment that hopefully frightens everyone into not opening anonymous attachments to their email.
As it turns out there are much worse things than viruses out there and all the Norton Utilities in the world won’t fix them.
Evy (Nina Kiri) cohosts a paranormal podcast with her friend Justin (Adam DiMarco) while looking after her comatose mother (Michele Duquet) upstairs. Therein we have the ingredients for a very creepy cake and newcomer Ian Tuason gets it in the oven for a torturous slow bake.
Evy and Justin play a series of audio files throughout Undertone’s 94-minute runtime that get increasingly more disturbing, detailing a young couple’s entrapment by an Old Testament demon that preys on newborn children.
Isolated and on the outs with her boyfriend, Evy, a skeptic by nature, begins hearing strange things, her home seemingly infiltrated by the evil audio.
Tuason lets his camera wander freely around the house, occasionally keeping Evy in the frame at a watchful distance. She often turns and looks around, sensing another presence, but there’s no one there.
Filmed on a measly half-million dollar budget, Undertone isn’t popping with CGI or gallons of guts. It’s a slow burner that applies steady pressure, infecting protagonist and viewer equally with a subliminal menace, and it’s well worth your time.
Pro tip: If a recording of a demonic summoning comes up on your playlist, skip that track. Do not play it out loud especially if you have a ton of unresolved guilt issues, like Evy.
Nothing good will come of it.
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