undertone (stylized all-lowercase) writer-director Ian Tuason staged his debut feature entirely in his Toronto childhood home with only two on-screen actors, with the other performances playing out in audio form only. After a Fantasia premiere last summer nabbed it an audience award, A24 scooped it up and reopened the edit, not unlike NEON’s recent handling of Shelby Oaks. Undertone joins a host of the distributor’s titles that have found great success in playing the Sundance Midnight category, whether their own productions (Hereditary) or fellow acquisition titles (Talk to Me).
In undertone, paranormal podcast co-hosts Evy (Nina Kiri) and Justin (Adam DiMarco) fulfill the roles of skeptic and believer, respectively. Our perspective stays with Evy, who has moved back home to take care of her dying mother, her days numbered after she recently stopped eating. Evy and Justin’s podcasting rapport accurately captures a hyper-specific, faux-casual cadence, a shade more natural than newscaster small talk.
Listeners of their podcast regularly reach out with leads, and this week’s investigation looks at ten audio files anonymously emailed to Justin. Reviewing the first file together suggests this will be a recurring log where an unknown young man records, at night, to convince his pregnant girlfriend that she’s been talking in her sleep. Though the audio grows more and more unsettling and unexplainable with each numbered clip, Evy remains unmoved, offering a rational explanation for each incident. Undertone wisely plays off audience imagination regarding what exactly is going on. The hosts isolate certain moments and play them on repeat, forcing a viewer to lean forward and listen intently in an attempt to make out what the hidden message might be. Justin and Evy’s online, real-time research fills the screen as they begin uncovering the presence of a demonic entity which dates back to the Old Testament and seems to be haunting this poor, unseen couple throughout the ten nights catalogued.
The haunting in the clips begins to seep into Evy’s isolated life. The same ominous, banging-on-pipes noise fills her house, and a nursery rhyme from her childhood is heard in the clips. Evy’s skepticism of any connection between the audio clips and her present situation grows narratively untenable. Her continual dismissal of it all as coincidence—and failure to disclose what she’s dealing with to her co-host—rings inauthentic, a bridge too far even for a staunch rationalist as herself. Interestingly, undertone is not the only movie in this year’s Midnight program that suffers from a protagonist who seems too unbothered by a persistent haunting, and Saccharine’s lead is also too casual when a hungry ghost first begins to haunt her.
The nefarious lore behind children’s nursery rhymes, a spirit that haunts you if you mention its name, demonic messages hidden in songs played backwards—undertone’s interests lie in a verbal storytelling present mostly in a pre-Internet world, where children would pass stories to each other to entertain and scare one another. Placing this old-world preoccupation within a contemporary setting involving podcast investigators is a compelling juxtaposition.
Some narrative and creative decisions confound. Evy calls her mother “Mama” like she hails from Little House on the Prairie. And a camera, otherwise content to hover around the house’s many haunted corners, occasionally grows restless and begins buzzing around the space, a decision which reads as incongruous placed next to the more considered visual language throughout. And after masterfully plotting the slow build of dread, the climax feels rushed and derivative of other, better horror movies. Yet moments in the climax do succeed; the explanation for that banging-on-pipes sound is unnerving.
Whether a shot of an empty hallway at night or a door frame where a wooden cross hangs, undertone maximizes visual dread with its innate understanding for what constitutes a liminal space. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly why these shots unsettle––they just do. Similar to Ti West’s House of the Devil using ’80s satanic panic as a jumping-off point to effectively serve up scares, the religious iconography in undertone mostly exists for mood-building that feels surface-deep. But that its mood is strong and scares are present might be enough. With its creative use of budget limitations and a real feel for haunting imagery, undertone stands out as a promising debut for Tuason and co. It also showcases that a pipeline of distributors discovering titles at festivals that punch above their weight, then granting them both additional funding and a larger platform, is still alive and well.
undertone premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and opens in theaters on March 13, 2026 from A24.