Jered Mabaquiao
I initially experienced writer-director Ian Tuason’s Undertone (2026) in its opening weekend in a Dallas Cinemark XD and IMAX theater. Undertone follows Evangeline (Evy) Babic, played by Nina Kiri, who is co-host of a paranormal podcast and token skeptic. Additionally, we understand Evy also takes care of her dying mother who is a devout Catholic. Evy’s house is decorated with various religious iconography. Her friend, Justin, voiced by Adam DiMarco, is the other host of the podcast and a firm believer in the possibility of another realm. Justin anonymously receives ten audio files, each sequencing disturbing activity experienced by a couple named Mike and Jessa who seem to unleash a demonic entity, named Abyzou. Abyzou possesses mothers and causes miscarriages or outright kills infants out of jealousy due to its own infertility. Throughout Undertone, Evy is wrestling with having just learned that she’s pregnant, out of wedlock, thus adding critical mental and physical stress involving whether or not she should keep the child.
The Sound of Horror
Evy’s podcast
In A24’s marketing for Undertone, I understood the film’s sound production was meant to be felt in the highest quality. That weekend, it was rather late and my local theaters utilizing the “intended” Dolby Atmos sound system weren’t showing the film—not that IMAX Audio is of lesser quality. I take it that Dolby’s sound system emphasizes precision and spatial depth over a heavy-duty physical powering, treating sound design like a weighted blanket. The experience is as important as the textual elements itself, so I think it’s worth mentioning my theatrical experience. As Evy puts on her noise cancelling headphones in preparation to record her podcast, it’s as if Tuason captured and translated the feeling of one’s ears being partially full of water after swimming directly into Undertone.
Undertone’s theatrical experience is encompassing, and the directional experience of the (non)diegetic soundscaping is deliberately difficult to distinguish. In other words, as Evy descends into cacophonic terror, so do we. This sonic spiraling is the narrative craft of Tuason’s film work and also an extension to us as viewers. We are deliberately discombobulated by the array of demonic sounds, subtle shifts from the houser, faucets running autonomously, whispers, rattles, and disembodied breaths.
In the subreddit, r/movies, Tuason ran an AMA (Ask Me Anything) for redditors to send questions or make comments about Undertone. @bawolvesfan asks how Tuason approached mixing the environmental sound in the film’s atmosphere between the sound coming from Evy’s headphones on her podcast and the file recordings. The user also asks if Tuason thought about the difference in experience between theatrical speakers and home release to which Tuason replies, “Well, I didn’t think about differentiating the theatrical and home release, but now I am haha.”
Naturally, I rewatched the film with headphones. I used a pair of Airpods Pro 3s to test whether any significant differences emerged in Undertone’s experience. There are. I find comfort in horror cinema and a rewatch on headphones produced a visceral affect that deepened my appreciation for Tuason’s work. Undertone’s auditory elements of demonic whispering, reversed speech, and children’s lullabies – along with all the sounds of death – burrowed significantly more into my ear canals, exaggerating that dull, waterlogged sensation.
Evy struggling to make sense of what she hears, as darkness surrounds
Undertone combines binaural and 3D audio, infrasound, and a sort of distortion and uncanniness of voice, elevated by static, inflection, overlap, and reversed speech/audio. The result is a soundscape that makes the boundary between what Evy hears and audiences hear feel porous, an effect bolstered by the recurring phenomenon of audio pareidolia. Evy and Justin’s conversations, in which they try to extract meaning from seemingly random and chaotic noise, makes us listen harder. As a result, we are strung along with Evy’s decaying psyche.
Undertone is in the wheelhouse of films such as A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018) and podcasts such as Quiet Part Loud (Spotify, 2022). Silence and sound are elements that structure and govern A Quiet Place, in which there is usually a clear object or subject that makes the noise. Undertone, on the other hand, takes the silence and noise (often freed from any definable source) and weaponizes them against listeners to induce a decaying of the psyche similar to that we see in Evy. With Quiet Part Loud touted as a horror fable, listeners similarly understand how spatial sound design and layered voicework can manufacture dread without any visual reference. Undertone pushes this further by asking what we hear when we can no longer trust our senses.
The Horror of Resonance
The pressures of caretaking – Evy in the darkness
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Ian Tuason’s Filipino Canadian heritage and how I think it plays into Undertone’s textual elements. As I mentioned previously, Evy’s mother was a devout Catholic and often asked Evy to attend Mass, stating she misses her company. In describing his personal story, as a caretaker to his parents, Tuason states that this role put him under considerable stress, which he tried to numb with drinking. Of creating Undertone, he says, “I drew from whatever emotions I was struggling with. Then I went back and rewrote a lot of the audio recordings that were sent to Evy to reflect the emotions that Evy was struggling with, which were repressed guilt resulting in denial.” It’s interesting to watch Evy’s experience unfold as the ten audio files are played. The aural representation of this returning repression is like a pressure release cooker. Tuason’s catharsis through Evy is mentioned here when he says,
I think I was also bottling up a lot of my emotions in that situation because, well, first, I wanted to numb it by drinking, and then as an addict, you tend to deny that you’re an addict in order for you to get your fix, get that relief. Then you start lying, and then I had Evy begin to lie. And the more you lie, the more isolated you feel because no one can help you because no one knows that you’re going through all those struggles.
Through this interview, I can identify with the sort of horror that Tuason’s brings to our ears.
In the spirit of ingrained familial trauma, Filipino Catholicism and the symptoms of guilt that follow could be seen very much like a southern gothic haunting. Between sin and secrecy, Tuason’s style and texture make Undertone distinct in its ability to amplify the internal, distorted, sometimes devilish voice that tries to govern one’s life. The atmospheric dread clings to the domestic space and the embodied experience of Evy. The resounding syncretism and ambivalence that Tuason inflects in Evy also reverberates in me as a viewer who resonates with this sentiment.
The competing religious iconography that structures Undertone – and Evy’s life
By the end of the film, the demon Abyzou remains, but underneath its chanting and pitch-black screen is everything that Evy could not reckon with—the guilt, grief, the uncertainty over her pregnancy, and the prayers she stopped believing in. Overall, Undertone sets up a soundscape that argues the most terrifying frequencies are the ones we find (and construct) for ourselves, the ones that have been put on a loop to keep us guilty and isolated. Undertone stands out in the wake of aural horror by further blurring the boundaries of listening and hearing and navigating the threshold between soft noise and deep silence and between what the body holds and what our minds can release.
Jered Mabaquiao (he/him) is a Filipino-American, PhD Candidate in the English department at the University of Texas at Arlington. He also teaches rhetoric and composition, and American literature classes at Dallas College. Jered also serves as an executive board member for the Dallas Asian American Historical Society which works on building Asian American communities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Previously a fellow for the Crossing Latinidades research initiative, Jered works broadly on projects interrogating racial melancholia, identity, and trauma in racialized narratives. His current project underscores political and financial economies, psychosocial politics, and popular culture in Asian American entertainment media. He has previously published for Horror Homeroom on Hannah Whitten’s upcoming novel, Reliquary and also on Curry Barker’s Obsession.
