The Undertone (2025) Fantasia 2025

Before we start be aware my reaction to this film is based on seeing it on a screener on TV with no surround sound. I mention this up front because this is film that an aggresive sound design that is a huge part of the film and if you don't have that your viewing will be affected.

A woman, the skeptic on a mysterious event podcast, is home waiting for her mother to die. As she does so she listens to some strange audio sent in by a listener and the sound recorded in the house she is in.

A film of sounds and silences, this is a film you are ether going to add to your list of films as one of the scariest ever made or on your list of films slightly more exciting than paint drying. I'm in the paint drying camp.

I should take a step back right here and say the final moments of the film scared the shit out of me, but it wasn't an earned scare. While it most definitely NOT a jump scare, as such, the frission it creates is just for those moments and not the 85 previous minutes.

The problem with this film its incredibly static. The mother is catatonic in the bed and never moves. The only other person physically in the film is the main character. That's it.  Visually its shots of the quiet house, some flashes of images and implications of other things, but mostly is just our heroine sitting with headphones on. Not much happens -until it does-hence the ending working- so the film feels inert.

Actually, this might have worked better as an audio play. So much of this film is geared toward the ears that I kind of wished I had headphones on (ADDENDUM: Liz Whittemore who did watch this with headphones loved it and said they are an absolute must). The audio is better than the visuals, though some of the sounds we hear sound wrong. For example, the voice of the woman singing in her sleep backwards has a metalic tinge to it as if played back on a recorder and not if they were actually making backward sounds. (I mention this because I knew someone who could mimic the sound of reversed audio and while it wasn't perfect it was freaky).

While I don't hate this film, I am not in love with it. This should have been told in another form.

Then again it may click with you, I have a couple of friends who will eat this up because slow or not they love a deliberately told horror film.