A woman sits in her old bedroom with headphones clamped over her ears, listening hard to a sound she has been told is not human. Down the hall, behind a second door, her mother is dying. Both noises reach her through the same thin wall, and undertone spends its ninety-four minutes refusing to tell her, or us, which one to be afraid of.

Ian Tuason’s feature debut arrives wearing the costume of a podcast thriller. Evy Babic hosts a paranormal show with her friend Justin, and she is the skeptic of the pair, the one who explains away every bump and whisper their listeners send in. Then she moves home to care for her mother, and a new batch of recordings arrives: a married couple, somewhere across the city, taping the noises that have started moving through their house at night. Evy listens the way she always does, hunting for the trick. This time the trick looks back.

Two faces, one wall

What makes the film hold together is a single hard rule Tuason sets and never breaks. Only two people appear on screen for the entire running time: Evy and her mother. Everyone else exists as a voice and nothing more. The co-host is a voice. The haunted couple are heard, never seen. The doctor is a phone line. The thing in that other house is heard, never seen. Even Evy’s listeners arrive as a wall of competing voices. The audience is pushed into Evy’s exact position, leaning toward a speaker, assembling the monster out of breath and static because no image is coming to do the work for them.

This is where the premise stops being a gimmick. Tuason came to features from immersive, 360-degree audio horror, and he builds the picture around a fact that genre filmmakers know and rarely trust: a sound you cannot place is worse than a face you can. A face on screen is finite. You see it, you measure it, you adjust to it. A sound with no source keeps expanding, and the mind supplies a body for it, and the body it supplies is always the one you are most afraid of. A door that may or may not have opened. A second layer breathing under a voice you thought you recognized. The camera stays close on Evy while the worst things happen at the edges of the frame, just out of view, exactly where a caregiver’s attention always sits: half on the task in front of her, half on the bedroom down the hall, waiting for the breathing to change.

The other haunting

Because the second haunting in undertone is the ordinary one. Evy has come home to watch her mother disappear, and the house she grew up in has turned into a place where she lies awake parsing noises. Is that the wind. Is that the furnace. Is that the last breath she has been dreading for weeks. The cursed recording and the dying parent are not two plots running in parallel. They are the same fear handed two faces. The film keeps asking what it costs to spend your nights waiting on a sound you cannot stop and cannot bear to miss.

Evy’s skepticism is the engine here, not a flaw to be corrected. She insists the recordings can be explained, and the film lets her be right and frightened at once, because an explanation has never once made a frightening sound stop being frightening. Knowing what the furnace does at 3 a.m. has never helped anyone lying in the dark waiting for it. The movie respects that. It does not punish her for doubting, and it does not reward her for believing. It simply keeps her listening, which is the one thing she cannot stop doing.

The house is his

Tuason has not hidden where the film comes from. He shot undertone in his actual childhood home, in a working-class Toronto neighbourhood, the house where he cared for both of his parents after they were handed terminal diagnoses within months of each other. The walls in the film are his walls. The hallway Evy cannot stop watching is the one he watched. That history does not sit on top of the movie as a piece of press-kit trivia. It is the pressure underneath every scene, the reason the haunting reads less like a threat arriving from outside and more like something the house has absorbed and is quietly playing back. A home where someone died holds the sound of it. Anyone who has sat in one knows the room keeps the recording whether you press play or not.

It also explains the film’s patience. Horror usually rushes to the reveal; undertone declines. It is building toward an ending Evy already knows is coming, the one every caregiver knows is coming, and it spends its tension on the waiting rather than the surprise. The scares land, but they are not the point. The point is the long stretch of nothing between them, the part of caregiving no one tapes: the pills counted out, the sheets changed, the hours of silence broken by a noise from the next room that stops your heart before you have decided what it was.

A decade spent listening

The podcast frame is more than set dressing, and this is the part the film’s loudest comparisons keep missing. Some critics reached for Hereditary, A24’s grief-horror benchmark; others for Pontypool, the Canadian film that made sound itself the contagion. Both point at the surface. What undertone is actually doing is turning a mass habit back on the people who practice it. We have spent a decade learning to fall asleep to a stranger’s voice narrating someone else’s death, treating audio grief as content to be consumed in the dark with headphones in. The film takes that exact posture, the one the viewer is probably sitting in, and asks what happens when the recording stops being someone else’s tragedy and becomes your own, looping in a house you cannot leave, on a schedule you did not choose.

Caregiving, the film understands, is already a kind of listening. It is a constant, low-grade monitoring of another person’s breath, and the people who do it are primed to hear catastrophe in every creak before they have had time to be embarrassed about it. undertone simply gives that listening a horror shape and lets the audience feel, for ninety-four minutes, what it is to do it all night, every night, with no idea which sound is the one you have been bracing for.

That is the question the film opens and will not close. A haunting can be survived. You can salt the doors, burn the tape, leave the house, and the worst of it stays in the building you walked out of. The other thing cannot be left behind. When the recordings finally stop and the second door down the hall stays quiet, undertone asks what survival actually hands back to the person still holding the headphones, and whether the worst sound in the film is the one that plays or the one that doesn’t.

undertone, directed by Ian Tuason and released by A24, is in theaters now, running ninety-four minutes.

undertone in theaters: the A24 horror that hides a dying mother inside a haunted tape

Two faces, one wall

The other haunting

The house is his

A decade spent listening

Cast

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