UNDERTONE. In the photograph Mary Todd Lincoln sits laden in the heavy black garb of formal Victorian mourning, with only her round pale face and clasped hands visible. Behind her is the transparent form of her deceased husband, his spectral hands on her shoulders. This photograph was one of many staged by infamous “spirit photographer” William Mumler, who sold his doctored photographs to the grieving families of dead Civil War soldiers. The widow Lincoln, who was in near-permanent mourning following the successive losses of three sons (tuberculosis, typhoid, pleurisy) and her husband (assassination), became one of the world’s most prominent believers in the 19th century Spiritualist movement, along with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Thomas Edison. Photography, electricity, the telegraph, the telephone — all were employed for grifts large and small. As we move into an era where artificial intelligence is challenging both our trust and credulity, it is worth remembering this is nothing new. Technology does not stamp out superstition; it often inspires and sustains it.
It seems inevitable that we were eventually going to get a movie about a cursed podcast. The American version of The Ring — about a haunted/cursed VHS tape — came out in 2002. If there were subsequent movies about demonic DVDs or parasitic iPods, I missed them. In the very creepy trailer for Undertone, you get a sense of why podcasts could make a good vehicle for horror. When you take away the use of one of your senses by clamping some noise-canceling headphones over your ears, you leave yourself vulnerable to whatever might be happening just out of sight. The camera angles of Undertone, which often show our central character Evy (Nina Kiri) bracketed by negative space just behind her as she sits in alone in the dark cohosting a podcast about the paranormal, capitalizes on that vulnerability.
Upstairs, Evy’s mother (Michèle Duquet) is bedbound and silent, apparently ready to pass any day. Her house is old, dimly lit and festooned with religious iconography. Evy finds out early in the film that she is pregnant. Her only friend seems to be her co-host Justin (voice acting by Adam DiMarco), who lives in London and — due to the time difference — can only record with her at 3 a.m. Spooooky.
The sound design in this film is superb, as one would expect. It’s immersive enough on its own that with a few edits you could easily imagine this film being a good audiobook. Unfortunately, we get little sense of Evy’s initial reliability as a narrator, or her inner life as she navigates caregiving and an unexpected pregnancy. The writing and acting come off frustratingly flat as the plot progresses. As though to compensate, there’s a whole lot of plot, and the movie fumbles a great premise by stacking multiple tropes on top of unstable lore. There’s the “found footage” trope, as Evy and Justin listen to recordings sent to them by an anonymous listener. The audios are of a woman whose husband is trying to prove she talks in her sleep, but become progressively sinister over time, recalling 2007’s Paranormal Activity. There are creepy children’s nursery rhymes sung creepily, statues that move and the invocation of an ancient god. And do we understand exactly what’s going on upstairs with her mother, whose prostrate and silent form nevertheless seems to exude dread?
Good horror and suspense films know how to exploit our collective phobias. Consider Wait Until Dark (1967), about a blind woman playing a cat-and-mouse game inside her darkened apartment with a violent home invader. Or how Rosemary’s Baby (1968) used pregnancy as an allegory for fears of invasion and social change. It seems insecure to barrage one’s audience with all the potential things they could be afraid of, and callow to give two of the more resonant things that can happen in one’s life — losing a parent, becoming a parent — the same weight and significance as the other jumble of plot points. It’s a hat on a hat, as the saying goes, and without giving away too much, one of the hats is infanticide. The next time someone writes a horror film about a podcast, they should pick a trope and stick to it. Mumler would have. R. 93M.
Linda Stansberry (she/her) is a freelance writer and journalist who lives in Eureka.
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This article appears in ‘Everybody’s Gotta Bring Their Skills’.
