Honest question: do we live in a post-cinematic world? Equally honest answer: no, of course not, cinema can absolutely meet the moment. The tools afforded the filmmaker — the shot, the cut, the actor, sound design, and the like — are certainly enough to properly address any moment, even our terminally digital condition. Film grammar is our grammar now, and a spate of horror movies have already spoken to lives lived compulsorily online, some (like Unfriended: Dark Web) quite successfully. It’s a scary thing, and it’s totally ubiquitous — it’s a horror we are forced not merely to endure, but to embrace with open arms each and every day.
Enter undertone, a horror film about podcaster Evy, who gets more than she bargained for when she receives an email replete with a series of increasingly spooky audio files as fodder for her show of the same name. The opportunities baked into the premise are manifold — the scourge of the podcast on contemporary society, the profane nature of parasocial relationships, the shattered boundary between the real and the imagined online — but undertone flat out refuses to address any of them. It instead plays out as a comatose, incoherent jumble of insincere swipes at commonplace anxieties like faith, death, and parenthood made all the more exasperating because of its overarching thematic and formal cowardice.
That said, there’s a rich tradition of expository, cliché-ridden writing in the horror genre of which undertone can count itself a part, but there’s a dim joy to be found in the dull familiarity of its story elements: the haunting, the clueless boyfriend, the latent vice that comes roaring back, the slow accumulation of mood by way of sepia-toned photographs and Christian iconography. What should distinguish and bolster undertone is its twist on this tradition: execute all the scary stuff with sound. And it’s true, you can imply a lot with sound design — none other than George Lucas said that sound is 51% of a movie, and David Lynch proved the maxim time and again in his work with a composer’s touch, especially in his debut Eraserhead. Yet if we are to understand a director as akin to a composer, first-timer Ian Tuason could be said to fulfill his duties with a Garageband producer’s sense of musicality, and he unfortunately leans too heavily on sound design reminiscent of the haunted house your local YMCA puts on every year: thumps and bumps and whines and whispers and “Paul is dead”-style backwards singing. In other words, this is still a far cry from Lynch, or from Kyoshi Kurosawa’s recent major achievement Chime, wherein subtle twinkles and rumbles commingle with exceptional visual daring and narrative economy. If undertone resembles any antecedent, it’s not the aural masters, it’s Steven Soderbergh’s underrated Presence, which, with its apparition-like dexterity and sparse mise-en-scène, might wind up setting a precedent for 2020s low-budget horror.
Suffice it to say, the other 49% also matters. There needs to be tension-building, even if it’s off-screen, even if it’s slow. Tuason eschews tension too thoroughly, though, giving us little to hold onto as he rehashes the same three scenes over and over: Evy listens to an unsettling clip, banters about it with her podcasting partner Justin while adopting the posture of the skeptical heel, and retreats upstairs to interact with her dying mother. In the right hands, this structure and style could produce a hypnotic or rhyming effect, but Tuason doesn’t prove here to be capable of that which Wang Bing or Tsai Ming-liang can pull off; under his direction, the effect is often stultifying. He pulls tricks from the gentrified horror top hat, like the exploitation of negative space, extreme close-ups, and slow tilts/pans for resonance, and he rests on Evy’s bemused face (Nina Kiri, perhaps cast more because of her photocopy-of-a-photocopy resemblance to Jenna Ortega than anything else) to dictate to us that what’s happening in those headphones really is terrifying. It’s tough to shake the sense that the real work needed to actually terrify us wasn’t put in.
Cinema can be found in the most unlikely places: in the face of someone looking at a screen, in sound design that titillates the imagination, in single-location shooting that evokes a wider world beyond it. But unfortunately, not here. Some movies should remain playlists languishing on their directors’ Spotify accounts; others could simply be a creepypasta. Some, like undertone, based on its final form anyway, just do too little to even justify their conception.
DIRECTOR: Ian Tuason; CAST: Nina Kiri, Adam DiMarco, Michèle Duquet, Keana Bastidas, Jeff Yung; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: March 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 25 min.
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