Explore the director’s use of practical audio, festival momentum, and personal loss that shaped Undertone
The horror genre often relies on visual jolts, but Undertone flips that script by making sound the main engine of fear. Director Ian Tuason built a tightly contained film around a lone, haunted podcaster named Evy — played by Nina Kiri — and designed nearly every moment to be experienced through audio. Instead of bombastic effects, the movie uses negative space and sparse recordings to provoke the audience’s imagination, turning ordinary household noises into sources of dread. That creative choice forces viewers to listen in a way modern horror often forgets, and it has become central to why many critics and festival audiences describe the film as deeply unsettling.
The narrative of Undertone is intentionally narrow: Evy co-hosts a paranormal podcast and cares for a dying mother in the suburban house where much of the film was shot. Files arrive from a couple describing strange events, and each new audio clip escalates the mystery while paralleling bizarre things happening in Evy’s home. By restricting the camera to a single location and following just one speaking character, Tuason eliminates conventional anchors of normalcy; when something sounds odd, there is nowhere else to look for reassurance. This constrained design converts pacing and silence into tools, and it amplifies the effect of each recorded whisper, creak, and distant thump.
From the earliest drafts Tuason prioritized audio over camera notes, treating the script as much a sound map as a screenplay. He experimented with placement—asking whether unsettling noises should appear in front of Evy, behind her, or as ambiguous space around the frame—and documented those decisions shot by shot. Many of the film’s eerie clips were captured practically: actors recorded audio on consumer devices in the real house where the movie was filmed, creating organic imperfections and spatial cues that studio libraries can’t reproduce. That pragmatic approach yielded soundscapes that feel lived-in and immediate, and Tuason often had Kiri listen to these recordings for the first time on set so her reactions would remain unfiltered and authentic on camera.
Key to the film’s impact is how practical recordings—including iPhone voice memos made by the actors portraying the couple—interact with on-screen performance. When those primitive files play in a Dolby-equipped theater they become visceral, creating a sense of positional audio and unresolved space. Critics have noted that Dolby playback heightens the work’s potency, turning background silence into an active participant in the scare. The film’s minimalist audio also encourages anticipation: viewers continuously ask what comes next, and that unresolved expectancy is precisely where the film mines fear. Tuason’s meticulous sound notes, which reportedly filled a long Word document and were pasted into storyboards, made those precise effects possible.
Behind the technical choices is a deeply personal origin story. Tuason wrote and shot Undertone in the very suburban home where he cared for his terminally ill parents; his experiences of caregiving and grief informed Evy’s character and the film’s tone. He funded a meaningful portion of the modest $500,000 budget himself, even using inheritance money to help finish the picture. The movie found momentum on the festival circuit: an award-winning premiere at the Fantasia International film festival helped trigger a bidding war that resulted in acquisition by A24. Tuason had even predicted a sale to either A24 or Neon in an early EPK recorded in February 2026, and the film’s festival run in July 2026 culminated in an aggressive pursuit the following month. Undertone reached theaters with a March 13 release and entered conversations about how theatrical sound still matters in contemporary cinema.
Reports from early screenings emphasize the physical, collective nature of the film’s scares: an anecdote from a press screening described an otherwise inconsequential prop falling and producing a theater-wide gasp, a moment that illustrates how shared listening can amplify anxiety. Reviewers often mention that the film’s predictable plot beats matter less than its sound design, which forces involuntary physiological responses—sweat, tense muscles, and quickened breathing—when played on high-quality systems. For viewers curious about the film, Tuason and critics alike recommend seeing it in a venue with robust audio playback; while the movie can be appreciated on a smaller screen, much of its intended effect depends on spatial audio and the subtle textures of practical recordings.
In sum, Undertone demonstrates how disciplined constraints, honest performances, and obsessive attention to sonic detail can reinvent what a horror film feels like. It’s a work born from grief and devotion to craft, turned into a compact cinematic experiment that asks audiences to listen as closely as they look. Whether you come for the festival buzz, the A24 acquisition, or the performances by Nina Kiri and Adam DiMarco, the film’s true power lies in the way it convinces you that what you hear can be more dangerous than what you see.