Podcast horror is en vogue right now, from the lo-fi Australian tale Monolith to even the ill-fated true crime podcasters in Halloween (2018). And now, fresh out of the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival, is Ian Tuason’s feature film debut, The Undertone, which takes familiar horror tropes and executes them flawlessly, resulting in one of the festival’s scariest films of 2025. Plus, a stellar performance by Nina Kiri grounds the horror in her deeply empathetic portrayal of a woman just trying to claw her way through the day.
Kiri plays Evy, co-host of The Undertone, a paranormal podcast where she and her friend Justin (Kris Holden-Ried) discuss the paranormal. She’s the show’s resident skeptic, constantly questioning the veracity of whatever piece of evidence they’re examining that week. Recently, Evy has moved back home to take care of her mother, who’s dying of cancer. Alone in the house, Evy records podcast episodes and ensures her mother is comfortable, even though she’s stopped eating or speaking.
During a recording, Justin plays a series of audio files that were sent to the show from a strange email. Over the course of the film, the duo listens to the ten recordings, only for Evy to discover that the escalating events in the recordings are being mirrored in her actual life. As Evy tries to understand her crumbling reality and cope with her mother’s looming death, she reveals a horrific truth about the recordings.
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The Undertone lives and dies by its lead performance and Kiri boldly accepts that challenge, creating a messy, empathetic character that emanates exhaustion, grief, and frustration. Her reactions to sounds both in her headphones and echoing around her assure you that you’re not alone in hearing something. What is it? Neither you nor Evy knows. But you both can’t help but feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Her reactions and physicality bring life to the primarily audio-based scares, forcing the audience to confront her harrowing reality.
The other star of the show here is the sound design, executed flawlessly by David Gertsman. As Evy lowers her headphones over her ears, everything goes quiet, the ambient sounds of existence blocked out by plastic and metal. The world, for a moment, is silent. But, as the film’s tagline warns, don’t trust the silence and from here, silence is weaponized for jumpscares and harrowing realizations. Plus, the audio engineering and design on the horrific recordings themselves feel like something out of Paranormal Activity as we hear a haunting spiral out of control. It’s a familiar narrative, but here it’s merely part of something much bigger and terrifying.
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This use of audio also helps expand the film’s world without having to move outside of its single location. Another Fantasia film, Hellcat, utilized similar techniques to fill in the details of their world without having to find more locations. Audio in The Undertone isn’t just a source of horror but a source of information as information about Evy specifically is revealed through phone conversations and podcast recordings. And while we learn the bare minimum about Evy (she’s in a terrible relationship, she has a drinking problem, etc.), it feels like some details are missing. Understandably Tuason wants to focus on the horror story at hand, but diving a bit deeper into Evy’s background and her relationship with her mother would have helped the film pack an even bigger emotional punch.
The Undertone is creative with its scares, even when they feel familiar. Kiri’s performance grounds the entire film. The film shines the most when it’s being honest about the hells of caretaking, and Tuason knows his way around crafting an effective and tense shot. This is another example of the future of found footage and how filmmakers are melding these techniques to craft new visions of horror. Thanks to incredible sound design and a stellar lead, Tuason is able to execute a deeply unsettling horror experience that treads familiar ground but still manages to surprise you.
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