In Review: ‘Undertone,’ ‘Reminders of Him’

Undertone
Dir. Ian Tuason
94 min.

Evy (Nina Kiri) has made a career out of not being spooked. As one half of the Undertone podcast, she listens to her partner Justin (Adam DiMarco) spin scary, purportedly true tales of the paranormal then uses logic to debunk them. Or at least try to debunk them: Justin’s not easily swayed by the Scully to his Mulder, but the partners balance each other out and listeners seem to enjoy their dynamic. That makes it all the more disturbing when their latest episode tests Evy’s will not to believe. After receiving a bizarre anonymous email with ten sound files, Justin and Evy decide to listen to them one-by-one. What they hear leaves even the pair’s resident skeptic unhinged.

It doesn’t help that Evy’s already in an upsetting situation, having moved back to her childhood home to care for her mother (Michèle Duquet) as she lingers near death. (Evy records the podcast with Justin remotely and, because of the time zones that separate them, in the middle of the night.) Lined with icons of Evy’s lapsed Catholic faith, some of them quite spooky, the house becomes her entire world and her mother her sole companion. The first film from writer and director Ian Tuason, undertone locks viewers into that uncomfortable space with Evy and makes it hard to fight the urge to flee. The film makes the house its sole setting; we never even see its exterior and even last year’s Presence allowed us to see outside. Only Kiri and Duquet appear on camera, though we hear plenty of voices (some of which don’t sound like they belong to this Earth). To put it bluntly, it’s spooky as hell.

That has more to do with Tuason’s technical skill and Kiri’s slowly unravelling performance than the story the film tells. As Evy and Justin listen to the recordings, they hear snippets from the life of Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas) and Mike (Jeff Yung), a couple who’ve taken to recording themselves overnight because Jessa has been talking in her sleep. It’s essentially a Paranormal Activity film rendered as an audio drama and it’s more effective the less Tuason depends on corny elements like ancient demons and spooky children’s songs that reveal hidden messages when played backwards. More effective still are the moments when Tuason lets Evy hear echoes of her own life in the recordings as she simultaneously misses the mother who can no longer talk to her, wrestles with feelings of guilt as she wishes for the end to come soon, and reflects on the faith she’s abandoned without fully escaping its influence.  A bit more fine tuning and it might have been a Repulsion for the earbuds era.

Instead it’s merely one of the most inventive horror films in recent memory. Making a virtue of the premise’s limitations, Tuason fills the film with claustrophobic shots in which Evy takes up a portion of a frame that’s otherwise filled with negative space that keeps threatening to be filled with, well, something horrifying, probably. In other moments, the camera slowly pans across shadowy interiors. The fear of what it will find at the end of its movement grows the longer the shot remains in motion until it ultimately reveals nothing—for now. Understanding the power of the monsters you can’t see, Undertone leaves a lot to our imaginations, then uses an aggressive, and often terrifying, sound design, to fuel them. When Evy puts on her noise-cancelling headphones, for instance, the sound of what she’s hearing makes the moment scary but so does the sense that she might be muffling out an even scarier imminent threat. (If you see the movie, seek out a theater with a great sound system.) It might be a well-worn tale of demons and satanic beasties at its core, but Undertone’s ingenious form gives it an unnerving intimacy that begins as a dreadful whisper then slowly turns up the volume until it threatens to drown out the rest of the world. —Keith Phipps

Undertone creeps into theaters tonight.

Reminders of Him
Dir. Vanessa Caswill
114 min.

When the by-the-numbers romance Reminders of Him opens, the forlorn-but-determined Kenna (Maika Monroe) is returning to the scene of a crime that had just cost her seven years in prison. Her sole reason for coming back to this painful spot is to see the daughter she birthed while cuffed to a hospital bed, but she’s lost custody rights to the child’s grandparents, Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford), who are not keen to grant her access. Why? Because Kenna was sentenced to vehicular manslaughter for the car accident that killed their son Scotty (played in flashbacks by Rudy Pankow), the girl’s father, and they haven’t come close to forgiving her. You may be asking yourself, “What specifically could Kenna, a seemingly lovely young woman, have done that was so terrible that she’s considered beyond redemption?” 

I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait 90 minutes to find out. And once you do, you may question the absurd source of Kenna’s DUI charge or wonder if she had the worst legal representation in human history. There’s really nothing here that couldn’t be resolved through a series of adult conversations yet the clunky apparatus of the plotting, courtesy of popular novelist Colleen Hoover (It Ends with Us), demands it. For all the pain Kenna and Scotty’s parents experience as a result of this entanglement, the conclusion is basically the analog version of “this could have been an email.” It takes an absurd excess of wringing for the tears to flow. 

Monroe does her best to put the audience in Kenna’s corner, and it helps that obstacles in her way are so unreasonable. Planting herself in a miserable apartment complex in Laramie, Wyoming, Kenna struggles to find anyone in town willing to hire an ex-convict, but she eventually picks up a job as a grocery store bagger and a love interest in Ledger (Tyriq Ward), a local bar owner. In a major plotting coinkidink, it turns out that Ledger, an ex-NFL prospect for the Denver Broncos, was Scotty’s best friend—he and Kenna had never actually met—and he’s been a father-figure to Scotty and Kenna’s daughter. As Ledger warms to Kenna, their romance threatens his relationship with Grace and Patrick, so he spends much of the time scrambling to tuck this secret away. 

There isn’t much worth unpacking in Reminders of Him, which evokes the Nicholas Sparks boom from roughly 2004 to 2015, but isn’t as enjoyably unhinged. The one flash of madness is casting Whitford alongside another Black male protagonist in Ledger, because their relationship is essentially on the same arc as Whitford and Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out, with superficial bourgeois accommodation eventually tilting into hostility. (A moment where Ledger encounters Patrick creepily watering his plants outside late at night turns into an unintentional horror movie scene.) But Reminders of Him is a disciplined mediocrity, sticking to picture postcard images and a happy ending that’s so much easier to achieve than the story allows. Next time, please have the courtesy to be crazier. — Scott Tobias

Reminders of Him opens nationwide tonight.