It is the fucking Eighties again except with digital files instead of cassette tapes and records. Satanic Panic remix! Well, sorry, church lady, it is not Satan, but there are demonic messages when skeptic Evy (Nina Kiri) and believer Justin (Adam DiMarco), friends and hosts of a podcast called “The Undertone,” play audio files backwards on their latest two-part episode devoted to ten audio files that a stranger emailed to Justin.  Though they are used to exploring the supernatural, this time, things are different. Evy is taking care of her dying Mama (Michele Duquet) and received some unexpected news. Why are films the new radio? Is Orson Welles back? I wish! WTF? No more psychological horror! Just make a drama about death! I need a French film, STAT! If you watch too many movies and are a horror connoisseur, this one may not be enough to raise your pulse even with the excellent sound design. I’ve been to Pentecostal church services in soulless New Jersey hotel conference spaces scarier than “Undertone” (2025). “Undertone” is underwhelming.

Evy is an unreliable character, and the only person that the audience sees onscreen who appears conscious. She has numerous identities and some appear simultaneously. She is at her most functional and unbothered when she is on her cell with Justin, but he cannot see her. She is unsettled during the recording of the podcast, and afterwards, she notices that the bathroom sink, or light turns on even though her mom is dying and lying unconscious in bed. Evy also starts acting strangely, which includes drawing with black and red crayons (who needs an adult coloring book), playing various other audio files backwards and doing web searches with disturbing imagery. Sounds like self-care. I kid! Kiri does a great job, especially the physical contradictions of her character’s true feelings and her outward facing persona.

The house is practically a character. Décor is one of the few ways to learn about what Mama was like before she prepared to leave this plane of existence. The place has so much religious art and old-fashioned, faded flowered, yellow background wallpaper that if a priest visited, he would bring an interior designer. Evy gets more of an escape from the house than the audience, who is stuck in there for the entire duration of the movie. Writer and director Ian Tuason makes heavy use of all the tenebrous corners and camera movement to keep the ball rolling, but it is like throwing a party in a phone booth. The novelty wears off once you realize how limited the range is going to be. Also, all horror movies evoke the terror lurking in the dark. Tuason does it well, but it is like making an amazing looking burger out of synthetic materials. It looks convincing, but I would not recommend taking a bite because you will be chewing forever and get nothing out of it.

Through implication with a voice mail message doing all the heavy lifting, Mama wanted her daughter to walk in her religious footsteps, but it did not take…or did it? In her own way, Evie is devout and devoting all her free time to acts of service and the supernatural albeit mocking. She believes, but she wants to rebel. It is almost as if she is trying to get a rise out of her mom and daring her to wake up to sacrilege or finding an alternate way to connect without following her childhood faith. It is also interesting that Evie’s closest friend, Justin, is a believer of a different sort.

There is not a lot about Justin since they only talk before they record the podcast. They have a routine, but he knows her well and can intuit exactly what she is doing. They live in different time zones. She rejects his offers to visit and help, but he still tries to find ways to help her from afar with advice about her relationships. He is almost like her inner voice who tells her what she already should be doing, but if that was the case, they probably would have a different kind of podcast.

I hated the podcast. It is found footage-esque. Describing the content of the audio files is a spoiler, but it includes nursery rhymes, loud noises, the sound of water and a couple of people talking. Tuason has something in common with my mom: they think nursery rhymes are inappropriate for children. The opening is heavy-handed in describing the lesson of nursery rhymes, which infers that Mama may have bad intentions towards Evy in trying to get her to pray, but Evy never plays that voicemail backwards. Was her mom trying to sacrifice Evy to a demon or did the demon manipulate her mother through tchotchkes, dust catchers, ugly art, naturally? Seriously.  

How is the mythology in “Undertone?” Rushed as if Tuason knew that pacing it better would invite scrutiny. While it is not as slap dash as most horror films nowadays, it feels less cohesive than it should considering most of the movie is a snoozefest, aka downright boring, aka everyone took the wrong lessons from Chantal Akerman. If someone must explain what I’m listening to, and I cannot distinguish words without a character prompting, “Did you hear that,” then proceeds to tell us what they heard, then this movie is a waste of time. It is aggravating. At least Tuason used a real demon, but so did “Hereditary” (2018), but that movie had the decency to feel demonic. This felt like cowardice and a shell game.

“Undertone” is about religious trauma and how it makes Evy judge herself and frame her choices as demonic for not living a life that her mom would admire. It is all guilt, fear and obligation, baby. It also wants to be about death and ambiguous loss long before death comes. For Evy, her mother’s death feels like the silent treatment as if she is withholding her words deliberately. It may also be about mental health issues, but only vaguely referenced along with the spectre of demonic possession. Evy’s history is alluded to without real details except insomnia. There are a lot of oneiric sequences when Evy thinks that she is seeing the supernatural, but is she asleep or hallucinating? The impact would have been stronger if it was a drama.

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It is also about bad mothers [to be]. If you want to be uncharitable, “Undertone” is possibly a screed against abortion with most of the horror reinforcing Evy’s guilt about contemplating her choices. If you want to be generous, “Undertone” is about the residual guilt of getting an abortion because this demon allegedly influences mothers to kill their children, and in this movie, there is no difference between abortion and a brutal slaying. Sigh.  

Here is the sad truth about “Undertone.” This story did not need a demon. It did not even need the supernatural, not really. The real headline: Catholic mom instilling creepy beliefs into her daughter that do not germinate and bloom until her mom dies thus rendering her incapable of having a functional life and her descent into isolated madness. Tuason could make a terrifying movie if he kept it psychological. Again, movies tend to shy away from the most provocative possibility of all: treating God like the monster. “MaXXXine” (2024) got close, but no cigar. There are currently two better films that deal with similar issues: “Smother” or “Heimsuchung” (2023) regarding problematic mother daughter issues and “Diabolic” (2025) which tackles religious trauma and is a better possession story. Instead, we are probably stuck getting a reboot of Sensurround combined with the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, which was not broken and does not need refreshing when it never got stale. Remake shitty movies! Or at least make the movie actually scary.