Canada’s creepiest little production studio, Black Fawn Films, have been on a real roll lately. Earlier this year their supernatural Horror from writer/director Chad Archibald It Feeds (a great indie scare fest for fans of Lights Out and Insidious, starring Twilight‘s Ashley Greene) hit theatres after scaring the pants off of everyone at Panic Fest. And now, the hometown team returns to Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival with The Undertone, a slow burn that really delivers the goods and crafts some of the year’s scariest sequences with nothing more than a microphone and your imagination’s ability to totally f*ck you up.
Written and directed by Ian Tuason, in his directorial debut, The Undertone follows Evy (Nina Kiri), a young woman completely isolated from the outside world while caring for her dying mother. Evy‘s only real escape from the day-to-day gloom is her podcast The Undertone which she co-hosts with a friend remotely. The show investigates paranormal events, and Evy acts as the super skeptical half that doesn’t buy into any of the BS her co-host Justin happily accepts as evidence of the supernatural. Their new subject? A cryptic email Justin received from a listener containing 10 unmarked audio files recorded by someone trying to document the silly things their wife says in her sleep. But surprise-surprise, those recording get REAL creepy, REAL fast.
“[…] a slow burn that really delivers the goods and crafts some of the year’s scariest sequences.”
I’m a huge fan of filmmakers who use audio as an integral part of their storytelling. It was my biggest compliment when reviewing Kim Soo-jin’s Noise (also an official Fantasia 2025 selection) and I won’t shut up about The Vast of Night, much to the annoyance of anyone near me that says “I haven’t seen a good UFO movie in a while“. Most people assume the visual component of a movie is all that really matters but The Undertone understands how sound can be weaponized to make you pee your dang pants in fear.
When you go to bed at night, it isn’t the look of a dark room that keeps you from falling asleep; It’s the sound of the floorboards mysteriously creaking, perhaps under the weight of some unimaginable evil slowly stretching its creepy claws from that darkness toward your pretty little face. When sound is the main driver of your fear, your imagination becomes a Master of Horror.
There are few things scarier than hearing a sound you can’t explain coming from somewhere else in your home when you think you’re alone. Tuason takes that fear and amplifies it in really effective ways by continually insulating Evy and engulfing her in petrifying soundscapes. And koodos to Nina Kiri, who is tasked with shepherding the whole movie from its quiet start to its haunting finish as the only character we see on screen, other than her catatonic mother.
In keeping with the film’s commitment to sound, and in an effort to show just how alone Evy is, nearly every other character she interacts with is either on the phone, in a text chat, or crying out from the past through those haunting recordings. And when a nurse visits to check in on her mother, she’s obscured by a door frame so we never actually see her. Evy is all alone, and the baddies are coming at her from all fronts.
“[…] an unsettling and dread inducing dose of doom that creates inescapable scares.”
The write-up in the Fantasia program for the film compared it to Kyle Edward Bell’s Skinamarink (2022) and Osgood Perkin’s I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House (2016) which may or may not sell you immediately. I don’t think The Undertone will be as impenetrable for most folks as those particular films but it is a little “artsy”, perhaps even to a fault, and a little more of a commercial approach to its story delivery could have really kicked this one up a notch for me. That said, The Undertone is an unsettling and dread inducing dose of doom that creates inescapable scare sequences. Even the scaredy cats in the room won’t be able to hide by simply closing their eyes. Jokes on you, scaredy cats. The Undertone is gonna mess you up The Undertone is an unsettling and dread inducing dose of doom that creates inescapable scare sequences. Even the scaredy cats in the room won’t be able to hide by simply closing their eyes. 😱
Ian Tuason’s The Undertone celebrated its World Premiere at the 2025 Fantasia Film Festival. Click HERE to follow our continued coverage of the festival, and let us know if you have any recordings of ghosts just sitting on your computer. Share all that spooky stuff with us in The Official Nightmare on Film Street Discord!Social Media is A Cesspool. Come Hang Where All The Cool Creeps Are.
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