Director: Ian Tuason Screenplay: Ian Tuason Cast: Nina Kiri, Michèle Duquet, Adam DiMarco, Keana Bastidas, Jeff Yung, Ari Millen Year: 2026
I'd heard a great deal about "Undertone". Several outlets were naming it among the year's best horror, and the A24 logo on the poster works by now as a promise in itself. I hadn't managed to see it, so I arrived with high expectations and every intention of agreeing with everyone. I couldn't. The film has an excellent idea, a genuinely strong atmosphere and sound work that deserves every compliment it gets, and it still ended up one of my biggest disappointments of 2026. Not because it's technically poor, but because it has no idea what to do with the one thing it builds well.
In "Undertone" we follow Evy Babic (Nina Kiri), who hosts a podcast devoted to investigating mysterious and supposedly paranormal cases. She and her co-host receive a series of audio clips concerning what happened to a couple, and the show's work is to analyse them and try to establish whether what they're hearing is real or staged. As they work through the files, things start happening around Evy that run parallel to the clips, and the viewer understands well before she does that something is closing in.
The sub-genre is found-media horror shifted from video to audio, and that's the film's best idea. The obvious comparison is "Pontypool" (2008), which also makes sound the vehicle of the threat, and the other reference point is "Censor" (2021), where a woman whose job is analysing recorded material slowly loses the ability to tell what's real. The difference is that both of those follow their premise all the way through. Here the sound design is genuinely exceptional, and it carries the entire film: the texture of the clips, what sits at the back of the mix, what gets implied without ever being shown. If "Host" (2020) proved a format can be the horror rather than its packaging, "Undertone" has the same ambition and half the discipline.
The problem arrives at the midpoint. The film accumulates tension patiently through its first stretch, and then you start anticipating exactly where it's going. From that moment the tension doesn't drop, it dies. The film keeps aiming at an explosive climax, keeps escalating as though something enormous is about to happen, and that something never comes. It does attempt a move at the end, but by then I was bored and had little interest left in how it resolved. It's a fairly clear example of how not to build a slow burn: a slow burn isn't about delaying, it's about making the wait worth something.
What bothered me most is Evy as written, and that's a screenplay problem rather than anything to do with Nina Kiri, who does good work with what she's given. The podcast dynamic casts her as the sceptic and her co-host as the believer. It holds up until things start happening to her directly. Evy sees what's going on, starts connecting the audio to her own house, and still insists the whole thing is fabricated. She isn't a woman missing the signs: she's a woman registering them and denying them. The script needs her blind for the plot to advance and finds no way to manage that without making her look foolish. It becomes frustrating, and there's a point where you stop fearing for her.
There are other decisions that don't hold either. The podcast mechanics aren't convincing: they meet repeatedly and seem to record ten or fifteen minutes each time, so the story advances in lurches and every session feels like an interruption rather than an engine. And ideas get planted that lead nowhere, like Evy's bedridden mother, an element that recurs several times and could be removed wholesale without changing the film. The moment that landed worst is one where Evy takes a box of crayons and scribbles aimlessly until she joins the dots and a face appears. It should be revealing or unsettling and it lands as awkward, close to cringe.
Anyone who values sound design as a craft will find genuinely good material here, and anyone with more patience than me for endings that take their time may get further with it. Anyone who needs a film to pay off what it promises, or needs its protagonist to reason the way any person would, will hit the same wall I did. It frustrated me more than it bored me, and frustration is the word that best describes the experience, because everything a great horror film needed was sitting right there.
Rating: 5/10
Ending Explained (Spoilers ahead)
The ending is fairly obvious, and that's a large part of the problem. By the time the investigation reaches the tenth file, it's clear to anyone watching that what sits behind the audio isn't a hoax or an ordinary crime but a malevolent entity. The film never states it outright; it keeps leaving it at the edge of what you can hear.
The mechanism is the one the film had been implying from the start: listening is participating. In playing that tenth file, Evy finishes granting full access to the creature that had been stalking her for some time. What happened to the couple in the clips wasn't a case to be solved, it was the instruction manual for what was happening to her.
And that's where the character's stubbornness collects its bill. Evy had seen enough. The noises in her house, the overlaps between the audio and her own surroundings, everything was available for her to stop. She kept going, insisting none of it could be real, and the film lets her reach the final file still holding that denial.
The resolution isn't shown explicitly. The film gives signals that the entity has entered the space Evy occupies, and cuts. Based on the rest of the runtime, above all on what happens to the voices in the clips, the reasonable conclusion is that the creature came to kill her.
It's a closing that gets straight to the point, and in the abstract it's coherent. The trouble is that it arrives after an hour in which the viewer already knew all of it, and a revelation the audience solved long before the protagonist did doesn't function as a revelation. It functions as confirmation, and confirmation isn't frightening.
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