phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2026

Undertone



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2025
Runtime: 1h 34m
Country: Canada
Language: English
Genre Tags: Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Plot Summary: Evy Babic, a skeptical paranormal pod-caster caring for her comatose mother, receives disturbing recordings tied to a folkloric threat, and every new file pulls her closer to fears she can no longer explain away.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: There is surely a target audience for this movie, and it is not me. I did not find anything scary about it. It's nicely shot, and creates a lot of visual interest for a movie that's mostly just a person sitting at a table, but the real meat and potatoes is the crappy podcast the characters are recording. It's a bad podcast. It's a bad podcast about listening to haunted voice notes. It's very spooky campfire story vibes, and that does absolutely nothing for me at all. I also hate the main character's podcast cohost. His tone of voice grates on my nerves to no end, so I spent most of the movie bored or annoyed.


Outside Reviews:

Brian Tallerico
3.5 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

The relatively slow burn that is "undertone" culminates in one of the most truly chill-inducing final acts in recent memory. As Evy's world collapses and "undertone" spirals in image and sound, we feel as trapped as she does. What does it all mean? What really happened on those audio clips? Or to Evy? Horror has been so dominated lately by films that connect all their dots and over-explain themselves for streaming viewers distracted by their phones. It's refreshing (if someone could use such a word for a truly scary film) to see a project that goes the other way, one that understands that it's the images and the sounds of horror that have the greatest impact, not the twists or the exposition dumps that explain it all away.


Katie Rife
Grade: B - Podcast horror undertone channels ancient evil through modern tech

The film's considerable fright factor comes mostly from its sound mix, which director Ian Tuason enhances by pairing scary noises with mundane visuals made unsettling by the enveloping darkness. Much of undertone takes place at 3 a.m., for reasons that only get the most cursory of explanations; that's not enough to ruin the experience, however, particularly when Tuason slowly zooms in on the dark, empty space over Evy's shoulder. It's much creepier to listen to backwards nursery rhymes on your headphones while diving into an internet rabbit hole late at night than it would be doing the same thing in the daytime, and that's the experience Tuason is trying to replicate here.