By Ramona Flume

There’s a lot of listening involved in Ian Tuason’s directorial debut, undertone, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24 at the Library Center Theatre to a palpably excited Midnight audience. 

Good thing actor Nina Kiri (The Handmaid’s Tale) is such a captivating listener to watch on the big screen.  

Kiri stars as Evy Babic, the co-host of The Undertone paranormal podcast, and film audiences are spoiled with her alluringly emotive active-listening skills as she becomes the solitary haunted figure in an increasingly audial-centric environment. We don’t ever see her “believer” co-host, Justin, (Adam DiMarco, The White Lotus). We only hear his voice when Evy dons her headphones at her home office desk to record their episodes remotely. 

Evy is an extremely isolated character, living back at her childhood home and acting as the main caregiver for her dying, catatonic mother (Michèle Duquet). And the practical horrors of this emotional burden are blatant enough, both in Evy’s drawn, fatigued face and the thankless menial tasks we see her perform at her mother’s bedside.

It seems like she’s hanging on by a thread, but she remains a withdrawn skeptic, even in her co-hosting duties for The Undertone (“where we talk about all things creepy”), which seems to be her one tether to the outside world. “This might be the only thing keeping me sane,” she says to Justin when he tries to reschedule an episode recording. That tenuous line is infiltrated, however, when the hosts receive a mysterious series of anonymously submitted recordings. The content of the 10 audio files is unsettling from the outset, and Evy and Justin start to unveil even deeper hidden messages when they play the sinister recordings in reverse. 

Maybe it’s the weight of Evy’s emotionally wrought surroundings or the nascent symptoms of an intense caregiving fatigue — or maybe it’s a simple case of audio pareidolia, the psychoacoustic phenomenon of imposing real words or meaning to ambiguous sounds. But as the film ratchets up into an aural landscape of nightmarish silences, hallucinatory reverberations, and out-of-your-seat jump scares, we start to see Evy’s entire reality fragment. 

Midnight fans of slow-burn, spine-tingling indie horror certainly weren’t disappointed after seeing this spooky supernatural thriller, which world premiered at the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival and was quickly picked up by A24. Sadly, writer-director Tuason, whose film was directly inspired by his personal experiences of parental caregiving during COVID, was not able to attend the Sundance Film Festival screening due to unforeseen health issues. 

“I’m really sad Ian isn’t here because this is such a personal story to him,” Kiri says at the post-screening Q&A. The film was shot in the actual childhood home of Toronto-born Tuason, who lost both of his parents in the last few years. “There was something there that made us all work harder and do a good job. And that was only because of his generosity to let us into his home. I thought that was a really special part of this.” 

Tuason’s original idea was to transform his caregiving-informed grief into a traditional type of radio play or horror podcast. And when he began adapting it into a feature-length film, he brought an exhaustive attention to detail to the expanded scope of the production. “When we first read the script, [Tuason] gave us a 300-page document that had where every sound could be found in the movie the whole way through,” producer Cody Calahan says. “It was basically like a giant Bible.” 

The final result is a layered genre masterpiece featuring an unequaled soundscape of hallucinatory, sonic frights. “What Ian would say is that there’s something a little more to this movie, something guiding it,” producer Dan Slater says. “We keep joking that the movie is haunted… But the flip side is that something is with us, pushing it forward.”

“I think this is a movie that the more you rewatch, the more you’ll see,” Slater adds. “If you watch it backwards, you’ll see a lot more.”