Undertone Review

Sound is the fear in Undertone

I am going to start by saying, Undertone will be a VERY divisive film, as you can tell by all the user reviews on various sites already.

You’ll either find it boring, or will enjoy the experience.

Me? I enjoyed it for the most part, but it does have flaws too, and it’s one of THOSE movies that I completely understand a negative reaction to it, but what can I say? I digged it.

Undertone asks you to pay attention - or else miss the point entirely, and while at times it was frustrating, at others, it was quietly thrilling. with a stubborn patience.

Good Points

• Meticulous sound design

• Nina Kiri

• Quiet tension built through space, pacing, and little shifts

• Intimate

Bad Points

• Pacing is stubborn

• Long camera pans occasionally tested my patience

• Narrative meanders at times

Silence becomes the loudest weapon.

Undertone is a film that asks you to listen, - horror is usually about what you see - but here the terror lives in the quiet.

It does start off a bit tedious, so anyone not a fan of slow burns need to avoid it, but I quickly became compulsively attentive with it all, where it makes you notice nuances you might normally ignore.

Of course, that level of restraint can be exhausting too, and some moments do test patience, but I respected the discipline, as Undertone trusts you to engage rather than spoon-feed everything.

As said, that style is not for everyone, and I get it.

A performance that anchor the quiet horror.

Nina Kiri delivers a very precise performance, where her character, Evy, is defined by small, deliberate gestures and a lot of subtle work, which really helps the quiet horror land, and we also have Michèle Duquet as the comatose mother, a character that could easily vanish into the background, but Duquet’s presence as the camera lingers on her makes you feel like every silence in the house has become amplified, and even when nothing happens, it’s the anticipation she generates that works really well.

Patience is the name of the game

Undertone is all about patience, where the camera moves deliberately, where it forces you to look over every part of the image, and even though some long pans did border on indulgence at times, those slow movements also revealed details that really heightened the experience for me - it’s a careful, tactile approach to horror which I like.

Sound design is the real star.

If the visuals establish place, the sound design creates the unease, and I am sure ONE thing everyone would agree on, whether they liked the film or not, is that the sound design is fantastic.

Listening without headphones is almost punishing because you miss layers of detail, and subtle cues, which compound the tension in a very psychological way, and we don’t really have any jump scares here, which is refreshing - it’s more unsettling.

And yet, if you have gone to watch it because of the marketing, and the obvious paid posts with over the top language, you might be expecting a boo fest - another reason why I hate film marketing sometimes, especially in the horror genre.

But anyway, Undertone is more about making you hyper-aware of your environment, keeping you constantly alert, with a sense of ambiguity that becomes its own kind of terror.

Intimacy over spectacle.

Most of the horror here simply comes from human experience - responsibility, guilt, care, and the delicate balance of a life lived quietly under pressure - where Evy’s attention to her comatose mother, her careful navigation of daily routines, and the subtle disruptions in her environment are all forms of tension.

It’s a horror that grows out of empathy rather than spectacle, and that intimacy also allows for narrative patience - the story doesn’t rush, and it doesn’t dramatize unnecessarily - and yes, some stretches felt too long, but I understood why, as the film wants you to inhabit this world fully before allowing tension to crystallize.

The balance between fascination and frustration.

I did admire Undertone a lot, even if I did have some impatience at times, as the pacing is stubborn, yet every time my attention drifted, the film’s careful layering of sound, space, and small human gestures pulled me back.

And that push-and-pull is central to the experience, as Undertone doesn’t reward passive viewing - it’s a mental exercise in noticing, a meditation on the quiet, and an exploration of suspense that doesn’t rely on conventional horror tricks - where he payoff isn’t a scream - it’s a heightened awareness of the world around you.

A subtle, restrained ending.

The conclusion follows the same philosophy., and while I probably wanted a bit more narrative payoff, but I also understood why the filmmaker withheld it, because the restraint mirrors the story itself.

It’s not a film for everyone as said (And I’ll keep saying it), as a lot will find the pacing too slow, the silences tedious, or the long shots too indulgent.

For me, though, it rewards focus and patience.

Final Thoughts

Quiet, meticulous, and uncommonly disciplined.

It frustrates, it demands, and it tests patience - but it also rewards close attention with tension that grows in unexpected ways, and a horror film that forces you to listen.

Would I recommend it? Nope, because as I said above, it’s one of those films.