{Movie Review} Play These Clips For Joe Rogan (Undertone 2026)

There is a particular kind of loneliness that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t slam doors or knock things off shelves. It settles in like a low hum — the kind you hear in a house that hasn’t had a real conversation in weeks, where the loudest sound each day is the machine keeping someone else breathing. Ian Tuason’s Undertone understands that loneliness with an almost unsettling intimacy, and it weaponizes it. The question for Tuason is not can you go home again, but rather does your home even exist anymore? The answer is unsettling to say the least.

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Undertone is a Canadian supernatural horror film that follows Evy Babic (Nina Kiri), a paranormal podcast host doing double duty as caregiver for her dying, unconscious mother. That’s the whole setup. Woman. Dying mother. Empty house. Long days. The banality of it isn’t accidental — Tuason is counting on you to feel the slow grind of that routine before he starts pulling the rug out from under it. Oh these creepy audio clips are here to break up that dreadful dark monotony. Lets listen to them!

Evy co-hosts a podcast with her friend Justin (Adam DiMarco), and their chemistry is one of the film’s quiet pleasures. She’s the skeptic to his believer, which is, if you’ve watched any horror movie ever made, a situation with one obvious outcome. What’s smart about how the podcast is handled here is how naturally it’s embedded into the world. These aren’t movie-podcast people doing movie-podcast things. There’s a rhythm to their banter, a lived-in quality to their recording setup that Tuason earns by letting the camera just observe. I found myself taking mental notes on mic placement and equipment. That’s either a sign the filmmaking is working or that I’ve spent too much time on YouTube rabbit holes about audio gear. Probably both.

The central conceit arrives when Evy and Justin receive a series of recordings sent anonymously. Ten audio files from a couple, Mike and Jessa (Jeff Yung and Keana Lyn Bastidas), who appear to be experiencing increasingly disturbing paranormal activity in their home. These recordings are the engine of the film, and they are genuinely, deeply unsettling. Tuason constructs something that feels less like a found footage movie and more like a creepypasta that someone with real craft decided to bring to life. The kind of story you’d find in a thread at 2 a.m. and immediately regret reading. #CreepyPasta #nosleep #cursedimages

A big chunk of the first act is just watching Evy listen. She puts on headphones, she hits play, and we sit with her and the audio. That sounds like it should be dull. It isn’t, because the recordings themselves are scary in a way that doesn’t rely on jump scares or cheap manipulation. The boyfriend recordings in particular feel like a direct nod to Paranormal Activity, but where that franchise eventually became about spectacle, Undertone keeps pulling inward. This movie has no interest in showing off. Rather it wants often encourages introspection. Which kids songs should you play backwards?

That’s actually the boldest creative decision Tuason makes, and the one most likely to divide audiences: with the exception of Evy and her mother, no other character appears on screen. Justin is a voice. The couple on the tapes are voices. Evy’s ex-boyfriend (I say ex because he sucks) is a voice. Everyone who exists outside the walls of that house is disembodied, which makes the silence inside feel even more total. It makes the conversations matter in a way they wouldn’t if we could see the faces on the other end. It also makes the film work better as a horror movie than it probably has any right to, because a disembodied voice talking about something terrifying is, it turns out, scarier than seeing the terror directly. Your imagination fills the gap in ways no production budget can compete with.

Undertone is essentially a one-woman show, and Kiri carries it without breaking a sweat. She’s on screen in almost every frame, often alone, often in silence, and she never lets you feel the weight of that. The performance is quiet and specific and just believable enough that when things start getting genuinely strange she doesn’t oversell it. There’s a conflicted quality to how she navigates the film’s mid-section, specifically around a party she leaves to attend, that Tuason doesn’t resolve cleanly. Honestly, he probably shouldn’t. The ambivalence about wanting out of the house, of the grief, of the responsibility is one of the more honest things about the script. Hell most of us adults, especially recently, routinely wish for a little less responsibility. You’re not sure how to feel about her wanting to leave, and the movie doesn’t tell you. But in her shoes we all understand why she makes the choices she does.

There is so much good stuff surrounding the mythology in the third act. Specifically the movies leans into a specific demon, Abyzou, whose backstory earns its place in the film’s larger thematic argument about motherhood. John Langan’s short story Mother of Stone and Orrin Grey’s favorite film Noroi as good places to start. Undertone is doing something in the same neighborhood: taking a piece of folklore and using it not as a monster-of-the-week but as a lens for something more personal and more uncomfortable.

Cinematically, the film is almost aggressively still. The camera mostly doesn’t move, and when it does, Tuason earns it. There’s a specific trick in the back half — a pan that appears to move away from Evy but is actually closing in — that is the kind of sharp, deliberate camera work you don’t see often enough in horror. No announcement, no underline. Just a realization that something shifted while you weren’t paying attention.

The Dutch angles that arrive at the start of the third act are almost redundant at that point. The film has done enough. You already know something is wrong. The tilted frames are the only moment where Undertone tells you what it should be trusting you to feel. Small complaint in a film that spends most of its runtime doing the opposite.

Undertone is not a film for everyone. If you need your horror to knock things over and breathe heavily in doorways, this isn’t your movie. But if you’ve ever sat alone in a quiet house with someone who can no longer speak to you and felt the specific weight of that silence this one will get to you. The way a nursery rhyme changes once you understand the words.

Undertone is Directed by Ian Tuason. Written by Ian Tuason. Starring Nina Kiri, Adam DiMarco, Michèle Duquet, Keana Lyn Bastidas, and Jeff Yung. In theaters now.