Undertone (2025) Review!!

Synopsis – A podcast host covering spooky content moves in to care for her dying mother. When sent recordings of a pregnant couple’s paranormal encounters, she discovers their story parallels hers, each tape pushing her toward madness.

My Take – While most viewers’ instinctively associate horror with the visceral imagery splashed across the screen, the genre’s most potent weapon is often something far less visible: sound.

We don’t see the sudden bumps and distant creaks that disturb the stillness of night—we hear them. And because their source remains unseen, our minds instinctively begin to fill the void with dread. Strip a horror film of its sound design and the experience collapses. The performances may still convey emotion, but the primal jolt—the instinctive tightening of the spine—simply disappears. That is precisely why so few horror films treat sound not merely as accompaniment, but as the foundation of their storytelling.

A24’s latest release finds debut writer-director Ian Tuason leaning fully into that overlooked artistry, constructing a film whose entire identity revolves around the act of listening. The result is easily the most unnerving film I have seen—or perhaps more accurately, heard—so far this year.

Drawing loose inspiration from familiar horror mechanics, including the old chain-mail curse of deadly VHS tapes, the film operates as both a technological ghost story and an exercise in sensory terror. Across its lean 93-minute runtime, director Tuason demonstrates just how much tension can be extracted from a single location, transforming stillness itself into a source of dread.

Sure, its stripped-down premise will test the patience of viewers conditioned to expect constant shocks. Particularly, as the protagonist spends much of the film seated at a table recording a podcast, the traditional scares are largely absent. Yet what might sound inert on paper proves far more gripping than many effects-heavy productions. The deliberately paced slow burn allows the craft of film-making—particularly its precise sound design—to take center stage, serving as a reminder that in horror, the imagination is often a far more powerful collaborator than anything the camera can show.

The story follows Evangeline “Evy” Babig (Nina Kiri), who has moved back home to become the caregiver to her dying mother (Michèle Duquet). Evy is also the co-host of “The Undertone Podcast,” which probes listener-submitted paranormal material with a skeptical head on her shoulders as her friend and co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco) is a believer.

For their latest episode, Justin introduces Evy to an anonymous mail he has received which contains a strange cryptic message and has attached ten audio files. Recordings belonging to a young heterosexual couple named Mike (Jeff Yung) and Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas), who also expecting their first child.

However, what begins as an amusement about the couple recording their slumber, because the woman is talking in her sleep, soon turns perilous as it seems something sinister begins speaking through her in the night. Though, Evy is determined that it’s a hoax, especially considering its mysterious source. But as they listen to each file one by one Evy begins to piece together the connection between these strangers and her own spiraling personal life, along with the undeniably weird stuff that starts happening around her.

What makes the film immediately striking is its commitment to the notion that what we don’t see is often far more terrifying than what we do. Horror has always thrived in negative space, but director Ian Tuason is among the few contemporary filmmakers who truly understand how to weaponize it. Religious imagery seeps into the narrative with chilling restraint. Catholic iconography, childhood drawings, and nursery rhymes bleed into the story in ways that feel both intimately personal and cosmically malicious. The lingering impression is that something ancient and indifferent has chosen this precise moment to press its weight upon Evy’s life—when she is least equipped to resist it.

The result is a horror film that feels almost cursed, as though the act of listening itself carries consequences. At times, a strange, superstitious discomfort takes hold—as if these sounds were never meant to be heard in the first place. The approach inevitably recalls the nerve-shredding minimalism of the original Paranormal Activity (2007), though director Tuason distinguishes his film by shifting that anxiety almost entirely into the auditory realm.

Here, sound isn’t merely atmospheric dressing; it’s the engine of terror. When the mysterious audio recordings play during the podcast, the horror becomes more potent precisely because we never see what’s happening to Mike and Jessa. The imagination is forced to do the heavy lifting. Directional audio cues, whispered voices, reversed nursery rhymes, and distant creeping noises toy with the viewer’s senses.

None of these devices are new to the genre, but director Tuason deploys them with uncommon precision. By the time the film reaches its final stretch, it evolves into a masterclass in sensory escalation—layering sound upon sound, tension upon tension, until the experience becomes almost overwhelming. Even cinematographer Graham Beasley amplifies the unease. His camera drifts slowly through hallways and lingers on doorways with an almost cruel patience, framing dark corners as if daring the viewer to imagine what might be lurking just out of sight. The effect feels both stylistic and provocatively sadistic. It’s as though the film invites you to fill in the blanks—only to punish you for doing so.

And since Evy is the only character physically present on screen, the film ultimately rests on the shoulders of Nina Kiri, whose performance carries both the narrative momentum and the mounting dread. Best known for her work on ‘The Handmaid’s Tale‘, Kiri is tasked with the rare challenge of sustaining an almost entirely solitary performance within the claustrophobic confines of her mother’s house. It is, for all intents and purposes, a one-woman show.

Kiri rises to the challenge with striking restraint. She plays Evy with a raw, unvarnished vulnerability, capturing the quiet desperation of someone struggling to maintain composure as every external—and increasingly internal—support system begins to crumble. The performance never feels showy; instead, it draws its power from small, human details: hesitant glances, shallow breaths, and the subtle tightening of nerves as the night stretches on.

Meanwhile, Michèle Duquet appears as Evy’s largely comatose mother, a presence that is physically inert yet emotionally haunting. Though she occupies little screen time in the traditional sense, her stillness becomes one of the film’s most unsettling elements, quietly reinforcing the oppressive atmosphere that hangs over the house. It’s also impossible to discuss the film’s effectiveness without acknowledging the remarkable vocal performances that power its off-screen world.

Adam DiMarco, Jeff Yung, and Keana Lyn Bastidas lend their voices to the narrative’s crucial audio sequences, and their work proves essential in sustaining the illusion of events unfolding beyond the frame. In a film where terror is transmitted primarily through sound, their performances play a vital role in gripping the audience and anchoring the story’s eerie auditory landscape. On the whole, ‘Undertone’ is an atmospheric thriller that creatively weaponized sound design to deliver a deeply unsettling nightmare.