Has so much time passed that we can considered Paranormal Activity something that gets thrown back to? (Don’t answer that. I may crumble into dust.) A24’s new horror film Undertone very much plays like a variant on that 2010s-era horror series. While those movies depended on grainy, realistic-looking video footage that could be studied for flickers of malevolent spirits, Undertone arguably goes even more minimal: In this audio-based horror, two podcasters start listening to a series of mysterious audio files. They fall into their prescribed podcast dynamics: Justin (Adam DiMarco, unseen in a vocal-only performance) plays up his credulousness, while Evy (Nina Kiri), one of just a few characters we see on screen, wants to debunk them as fake, or at least unscary.
But as they continue recording their episode (piecemeal, supposedly because Evy is also taking care of her dying mother), they listen ever closer and more carefully, and hear weirder stuff. Evy also starts to wonder if she’s seeing things around her mother’s house, where she’s recording in the dead of night. The audience is prompted to squint and prick up their ears along with the heroine, listening for whatever might sound eerily off. In case you still couldn’t quite make it out, or understand the movie’s sometimes-vague implications about its audio files, Decider has you covered. Let’s dig into the latest episode of the world’s slowest-recording podcast and explain the ending of Undertone.
Undertone Plot Summary
As mentioned, Evy is living at her mother’s house, essentially waiting for her terminally ill and comatose mother to pass away, and caring for her in the process (while also feeling guilt over not sharing her mother’s Catholic faith). She and her friend Justin record their podcast remotely, late at night, owing to time-zone differences. Their show is sort of a shut-in X-Files where the pair loosely investigates creepy audio files. The movie follows them as they record an episode featuring a group of ten audio files that Justin has been sent anonymously. These are the files that are basically a miniature Paranormal Activity radio play. They’ve been recorded by a couple, Mike and Jessa, trying to capture evidence of Jessa talking in her sleep. Jessa has been singing children’s songs that, when played backward, may or may not be delivering sinister messages.
As the podcasters make their way through the recording of a single episode and do research about the demon that Jessa may have mentioned in her one of her coded messages, Evy starts noticing strange goings-on about the house. She also finds out that she is pregnant, and confesses to her unconscious mother that she doesn’t feel fit for parenthood herself. At one point, during one of the recording sessions, Evy catches herself drawing one of those creepy crayon images that kids draw in movies about haunted houses. She also thinks she sees her comatose mother moving around (and we, the audience, definitely see that, in one of the movie’s creepiest shots).
Undertone Ending Explained: What’s In the Scary Audio Files?
The final files feel as if Jessa is communicating directly with Evy, even though that should be impossible. The podcast also takes live phonecalls, and a series of them reveal some more information, or seem to: Someone calls in claiming to be Mike and Jessa’s neighbor, saying that the couple was found dead in their home with crayon drawings all over the walls. Another caller asks for “Mary,” the name Evy has mentioned as a prospective name if she had a child. And a final caller has a crying baby in the background, the woman screaming for help and threatening to murder the child. It sounds as if that might have happened, despite Evy and Justin’s protests, as their listening reaches a fever pitch of fear and paranoia.
All of this seems to be the work of the demon Abyzou, who supposedly causes miscarriages and child murders out of rage at her own infertility. Evy has inadvertently summoned the demon to the house by playing the recordings of Mike and Jessa (one of them sounds like “come in, Abyzou” when played backwards), though filmmaker Ian Tuason has suggested that she also had a subconscious wish for the demon to come and make the choice involving her unborn child for her. In the film’s closing moments, Evy runs upstairs to her supposedly unconscious mother, and finds the walls covered in crayon drawings, as well as her presumably possessed mother up from her bed. As the film cuts to black, we hear screams and a scuffle, including what sounds like Evy begging something from her mother, but don’t see Evy or her mother’s final fate. (Or Justin’s for that matter.)
It’s reasonable to assume that Abyzou has possessed Evy’s mother. The question is whether Abyzou-Mom then kills her child, Evy; if Evy is able to vanquish the demon by killing its host body once and for all, acting out the guilt she feels over having “killed” her mother by not believing in prayer; or, you know, some other third thing. The film is relatively ambiguous, but there’s also no real reason to assume that Evy has the know-how to kill a demon possessing her mother’s body, or if that’s even possible. There’s been little information about how the demon can be defeated that would set that up, while there has been plenty of set-up about the demon possessing people and killing their children. There’s a remote possibility that the demon could possess Evy and cause a miscarriage, but that’s not exactly horror-movie chilling in this particular context.
So really, we’re left with the Paranormal Activity ending where someone is dragged away and the recording ends, though in this case the recording is only audio. Thematically, it only makes sense for Evy to remain trapped in her mother’s house, whether through death or some other kind of curse.
At the same time, some horror fans might the whole thing schematic and lacking in resonance (no pun intended). It’s arguable that the movie gussies up some pretty old-fashioned anxieties about motherhood, elder care, and religious belief with a modern internet-horror sensibility. That’s not to say these anxieties are invalid, or couldn’t be explored in a great horror film; just that if the ending of the movie falls flat for you, it might be because it hasn’t really laid the thematic groundwork that can really exploit the fears it conjures. Tuason never really fully sells the idea that Evy is weighed down with guilt or inner conflict about having a child, nor does he have her commit some kind of foolhardy transgression that seals her fate. What does this character’s ambivalence about motherhood really have to do with her own mother? Does she not want to burden her own child with future elder care, or does she have selfish anxiety about denying herself that care in her own later years? Was her mother’s religion genuinely oppressive to her, or is she having second thoughts about her faith? The movie never really gets into the details. As a result, whatever happens to Evy just kinda seems like a run of horrific luck.
Again, that’s allowed in horror, and Undertone‘s quiet menace worked for a lot of people; it was hailed by some critics as the scariest horror movie of the year or even longer. But if there’s one thing the movie makes clear, it’s that not everyone hears every creepy noise the exact same way.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
