undertone Review: Bone-Chilling A24 Horror is Paranormal Activity for the Podcast Generation
Nina Kiri and Adam DiMarco play podcast hosts who find a disturbing set of recordings in Ian Tuason’s debut feature
Words by Alex Secilmis 29 January 2026
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Good press can be a dangerous thing for a horror movie. If early reactions overzealously emphasise how frightening a film is, it will have to overcome the expectations of later audiences, who will inevitably subject each scare to an added scrutiny. Winning the Gold Audience Award at last year’s Fantasia Fest and picked up for seven figures by A24 after a heated bidding war, undertone is one such film—one which, like the haunting audio clips at the heart of the narrative, has the raw power to win the skeptics over. An old-school demonic possession horror filtered through audio found footage, it’s hard to watch undertone without feeling like you’ve been cursed yourself. This is undeniably one of the scariest films of the 2020s.
Having moved back home to care for her dying mother (Michèle Duquet), the only thing keeping Evy (Nina Kiri) sane is running her paranormal podcast, “The Undertone”. When her co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco), the believer to her cynic, sends her 10 mysterious audio files received from an anonymous email, Evy starts to notice unsettling parallels between the recordings and her real life. What follows is a steady descent into darkness, in which she becomes fixated on subliminal messages in children’s songs (an overused but ever effective trope) and finds her skepticism put to a very taxing test by listening to the strange occurrences afflicting the pregnant couple recorded in the audio files.
Courtesy of A24
Already booked for next year’s Paranormal Activity on the merit of this debut feature, director Ian Tuason leverages his VR background for a spatial audio experience that finds a haunting noise in every inch of its meticulously curated soundscape. By cutting the ambient sound entirely when Evy puts on her noice-cancelling headphones to record the podcast, the film aligns the viewer intimately with her perspective and places them at the mercy of David Gertsman’s sound design. Like De Palma’s Blow Out, undertone lingers in the suspense of an amplified recording, where the viewer tries to discern the crucial, muffled detail in real time before the characters do. The headphones conceit raises another distressing question: Which strange noise are coming from the recording, and which ones are coming from Evy’s house? Completing the film’s stirring violation of the home as a safe space, Graham Beasley’s cinematography alternates between an eerie moving camera and static shots which feature two rooms in a single frame to suggest that poor Evy has company.
The only performer on screen for most of the film, Nina Kiri is phenomenal in what should surely be a breakout role. While undertone will be lauded for its technical achievements, from the sound design to the cinematography, Kiri grounds what could feel like a gimmick in an unnerving realism with her truly gripping performance.
Courtesy of A24
As far as the plot, undertone is not an especially prestigious horror movie, and it will likely have its fair share of detractors as a consequence. While it may be poised to join the ranks of Sundance horror classics, this isn’t Hereditary—the film’s mythology and tropes are intensely familiar, and there’s a charming B-movie cheesiness to Evy and Justin's gradual discovery of the evil force they’re dealing with. But the strength of undertone lies in its presentation, not to mention a well-paced script that manages to sustain a feeling of pervasive dread for the full 90-minute runtime. It’s why the comparisons to Paranormal Activity are so apt—this is found footage at its finest, and its priority is cultivating an inescapable unease in the audience rather than impress them with a moving metaphor.
A breathtaking horror film about things that go bump in the waveform, undertone transcends the podcast gimmick with such disturbing verve that you may lose sleep over it. Tuason’s striking debut will have you covering your eyes—and ears.