'Undertone' is the horror film for everyone who's too scared to take their headphones off

Walking home alone at night, noise-cancelling headphones sealed over both ears, deep inside a true crime podcast about a woman who was followed home — unable to hear footsteps, having paid good money to make sure of it. Nobody had put this specific modern predicament in a horror film until Ian Tuason did, on a $500,000 budget, in his parents’ house in Toronto.

Undertone, released by A24 on 13 March, has already grossed thirty times its budget. It follows Evy, a paranormal podcaster caring for her comatose mother, who begins receiving anonymous audio files documenting a couple’s encounter with something in their home at night. It’s an on-the-nose spooky movie where a metaphorical problem (podcasting) is made explicitly and literally demonic.

The bit about the headphones

Tuason’s background is in immersive 360-degree VR horror shorts — films that accumulated nine million organic YouTube views before anyone knew his name. His primary interest was always audio as the architecture of dread, and undertone is essentially that obsession scaled up to feature length and placed inside a Dolby Atmos cinema.

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The structural move is precise: Evy and her mother are the only characters who appear on screen. Everyone else — her London-based co-host Justin, the couple in the recordings, the doctors, exists only as voice. The absorbing nature of the film’s sound design immerses audiences in suspense and sparks the imagination. As Evy listens for clues, the film provokes audiences to imagine the sound, understanding that the scariest images are the ones conjured in the mind rather than shown on screen.

As one critic wrote of the experience: “Kimber Myers at Crooked Marquee spent most of the running time with actual chills, drawing her knees into her chest and using the progression through the ten emailed recordings to estimate how much more time she’d be panicking for.”

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True crime podcasts have spent a decade doing something very particular to their listeners: training them to find menace in ambient sound, to hear significance in a creak, to lie awake constructing threat from incomplete information. Since Serial injected the podcast medium with its particular formula, the format has elevated openly troubling subjects into a new form of compulsive entertainment.

Made in a dead man’s house

The film was made in Tuason’s dead parents house. Both parents had faced terminal cancer in the early 2020s. The film grew from that period from the sleeplessness of caregiving, from the strange compression of living again in a childhood home, from whatever the mind starts producing at 3am when it has been awake too long. The camera swirls up and around the old home of the dying Catholic woman, tracking shots moving and bending in ways the house’s architecture cannot support — not disorienting so much as highly upsetting.

Religious imagery fills every corner: crosses, statues, the damage done to and by mothers who didn’t want to be mothers casting a long shadow that is every bit as upsetting as hearing “Baa Baa Black Sheep” played in reverse on repeat.

The demon at the centre of the film, Abyzou, is drawn from actual Mediterranean and European folklore , historically blamed for miscarriages and infant deaths, infertile herself, jealous of those who aren’t. Whether it is real or whether Evy’s insomnia and grief have simply broken something in her perception is a question the film refuses to answer cleanly.

As critic Nicolás Delgadillo wrote: “This is a film that rewards patience, close attention, and repeat viewings. If you tap into its unique wavelength, U_ndertone_ is a work that lingers long after the sound cuts out, leaving you alone with whatever the mind conjures next.”

Tuason is now directing Paranormal Activity 8 for A24, taking what he calls “the same principles and the same team.” A trilogy for undertone itself is reportedly in discussion. For a film made in a dead man’s house by a first-time director with half a million dollars, the trajectory is either remarkable or entirely predictable — horror has always known that the cheapest locations carry the most weight.