Isolation, paranoia, guilt, and silence are a recipe for unholy terror in Undertone, a thriller that asks its audience to look and listen closely for the clues hidden in the quiet and the dark.
Premiering in the midnight section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Ian Tuason’s impressive directorial debut adjusts itself to a sinister frequency and then slowly dials up the malevolence, in the process leaving reason and lucidity behind. A medley of fears, anxieties, and regrets that repeatedly messes with the senses, it exists at the nexus of sanity and madness, life and death, Heaven and Hell, and sound and image.
Evy (Nina Kiri) has moved back home to care for her dying mother (Michèle Duquet), with whom she lives in a house decorated with Christian iconography. Undertone (in theaters Mar. 13) never mentions Evy’s own faith, yet it’s fair to assume she’s no zealot, given that she hosts a podcast about the paranormal with her long-distance friend Justin (The White Lotus’ Adam DiMarco) in which she plays the skeptic to his true believer.
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