There’s something undeniably spooky about nestling your ears in headphones, listening to mysterious audio files, and hearing something sinister concealed in the background or hidden in reverse. Undertone has that atmosphere down of being unsure if that creepy voice was coming from your speakers or upstairs. Where it chooses to go with this idea is less impressive than the mastery of audio scares and freaky revelations spun from a haunted podcast confined to a scary interior.

The film starts intriguingly enough with the desire to listen, drawing the audience into the home life of Evy (Nina Kiri). She cares for her silent and bedridden mother (Michèle Duquet) during the day and spends her nights recording a paranormal podcast. With her co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco) on the other line, they get into characters as they watch and listen to frightening media posted online. They have a believable dynamic in how they get into character for recording and play off each other, with Evy being more skeptical than Justin of cursed audio and video. Their latest episode features 10 audio recordings of a married couple, each with a strange message attached. For Evy and Justin, there’s something spine-chilling enough about the recordings to break up the episode across multiple nights.

Plenty of chills can be evoked within the house of Evy’s mother, and there’s a simmering terror to explore. Did her mom get up when she wasn’t looking? Why are the lights turning on by themselves? What was the loud rustling upstairs? Is the clock going backwards? These subtle doses of horror have some appeal on the surface as Evy’s more internal anxiety of alcoholism and parenthood creep into her psyche. But the material stretches when Dutch angles are favored, and the audio files become as overt as Evy’s darkest fears manifesting.

Once it becomes clear what Evy is truly being haunted by within the house and on her laptop, autopilot is enabled as all the greatest hits of haunted house movies drop in the final moments. There’s the TV with a shocking image that can’t be turned off, the child-like scribbles on the walls, the all-in-her-head realizations, and the good-old-fashioned exploding lightbulb. While I don’t mind these scare tactics, I felt like I was watching more of a showreel than a horror story that was tapping into something darkly psychological. It’s madness that is more cosmetic than discomforting.

Undertone has the right levels of tech-based terror but needs to turn up the psychological chills rather than level them off. There’s a mystery in the first half of the film that is enough to make one lean closer to the screen, listening carefully to every background voice or to muffled noises from the ceiling. But as the revelation arrives bluntly just before the shocking conclusion, the results are about as nightmarish as the investigation’s reversal of classic children’s songs for hidden messages. It’s spooky, but also very anticlimactic, riding out the podcast frights with horrors more workhorse than rattling.

Not available on any streaming platforms.

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