It’s been nearly a year since Undertone first made its world premiere at Fantasia International Film Festival and left critics so creeped out it started a bidding war that ultimately saw A24 nab the theatrical rights. Now the buzzed-about audio horror film is finally available to stream at home on the subscription-based HBO Max.
So is the film worth the hype? And what was that ending about? Let’s take a deep dive into Undertone, which is now streaming. Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Undertone.
Does Undertone live up to the hype?
As with any art, it’s subjective, but the film certainly does what reviewers said it would. Thanks to its dark edges and aged setting, the movie absolutely leaves viewers peering past the main (and nearly lone) character, Evy Babic (Nina Kiri), to see what might be lurking in the shadows at all times. Plus, the sound is disorienting — the use of noise-cancelling headphones leaves other sounds inaudible … which reads like a threat, at times.
What is Undertone about?
The movie follows the skeptical Evy and her more supernatural-curious podcast cohost Justin (voiced by Adam DiMarco) as they listen to a series of 10 audio recordings of a couple, named Jessa and Mike, as they experience increasingly unsettling nightime disturbances involving a creature called Abyzou. All the while, Evy is alone as she cares for her dying mother, whose religious fanaticism drove them apart, and an unplanned pregnancy.
After discovering that certain records — including her favorite childhood song, “Baa Baa Black Sheep” — when played in reverse give off terrifying messages (like “Mike, kill all” and “lick the blood off”), Evy struggles to maintain her disbelief in the eerieness of it all. Worse, she and Justin eventually discover that Abyzou was a mythological demon who caused women to murder their own babies.
How does Undertone end?
The final recording features Jessa mentioning that someone is listening, which Evy interprets to mean her. She and Justin accept live callers, and the results are beyond unnerving. One such is a neighbor of Jessa and Mike’s, who reports that Jessa was pregnant, and they were both found dead with bags over their heads and drawings of infants on the walls of their homes. Another demands to speak with Mary, which is the name Evy told her mother she might name her unborn baby. Then another caller seemingly drowns her baby live on the call. As Evy attempts to talk the woman out of harming her child, she confesses that it was she who caused her own mother’s death by refusing to pray.
After finishing the final audio, which chants for Abyzou to come in, Evy is seen staring at the screen of a supposedly hoax video that would cause viewers to slice their own ears. She then finds her staircase walls covered in baby drawings along with images of Abyzou and finds her mother standing upstairs. She appears to be attacked before the screen cuts to black, and we hear what sounds like an attack, along with the cries of a baby, like what was heard in the final audio file.
What happened to Evy in the end?
It appears as though Evy’s mother became possessed by Abyzou after Evy and Justin listened to the final tape and invoked the demon. She then attacks Evy to murder her unborn grandchild.
Writer-director Ian Tuason explained the inspiration for the story’s climax to In Review Online, saying, “I wanted to find a demon from ancient folklore that killed children. The idea was that Evy doesn’t want to have a child, and maybe she’s unconsciously summoning this demon to take away this burden that she has. That was the original idea. And then I found Abyzou, which was a demon from the Testament of Solomon, which is an ancient book, an ancient scripture. She was perfect for this movie. Again, it’s just like nursery rhymes. The Testament of Solomon is passed on through oral tradition. Solomon’s Testament was his oral rendition of what he says he went through. Then that gets passed on from generation to generation until we have this being that exists only in our imagination. But since we’re all connected in many ways, in language and culture, who’s to say that this entity doesn’t really exist?”
He also likened the demon’s infiltration of Evy’s home to “an audio virus where you shouldn’t have exposed yourself to these audiotapes because now it’s too late, you’re infected.”
Undertone, Streaming Now, HBO Max