Undertone: An Effective Piece of Indie Horror Filmmaking

According to The Skeptic’s Dictionary, “apophenia” is “the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena.” Or, in more recent years, it has come to define “a human propensity to unreasonably seek definite patterns in random information.” Have you ever thought you saw a face in a cloud? That’s apophenia at work, as your brain struggles to see patterns. This phenomenon is perhaps unsurprisingly also linked to individuals with creativity or paranormal beliefs. Directors have long toyed with cinematic darkness to create dread for what lies outside the frame, but with the rise of digital cameras, indie films began leaning into this sensation, spawning a wave of film some might appropriately call “apophenia horror” or “internet horror” (‘The Blair Witch Project,’ ‘Paranormal Activity,’ ‘Skinamarink’—often using “found-footage” aesthetics). These films are thrilling on the big screen, but can be equally effective in the darkness at home with headphones, convincing audiences that the sounds on screen could be coming from inside their own space.

All of this makes it no surprise that the team behind Undertone were actually approached to direct the upcoming ‘Paranormal Activity 8’, as the film joins this group, circling its story around the apophenia phenomenon while crafting a patient, slow-burning experience through an excellent array of sound design centred on breathy, intense domestic conversations and creepy reversed children’s lullabies. Writer-director Ian Tuascon pushes audiences to scan the darkness, building tension through precise escalation and the exhilarating use of the camera, establishing his feature film debut as an early standout of 2026.

The film stars Nina Kiri as Evy, a paranormal podcast host who plays the skeptic opposite her believer co-host Justin (DiMarco). Already stretched thin after moving back home to care for her dying mother (Michèle Duquet), Evy’s fragile sense of control begins to unravel when the show receives ten mysterious audio recordings from a married couple named Jessa and Mike (Keana Lyn Bastidas, Jeff Yung), beginning with the wife talking in her sleep, before further escalating and pulling Evy deeper into a spiral of dread and paranoia.

Primarily acting alone on screen and confined largely to a bedroom and living room, much of the film rests on Kiri’s powerhouse performance, as each audio file chips away at Evy’s psyche and her confidence in disbelief. It’s a subtle turn that captures the neurotic, obsessive feeling of staying up late at night and falling deeper into internet rabbit holes. Meanwhile, Tuascon and cinematographer Graham Beasley continually find inventive ways to keep the chamber piece from growing stale: subtle shifts in lighting and camera movements that lurk through empty spaces mirror Evy’s imagination as she begins to picture what the recordings might look like inside her own home. In more than one standout sequence, a conversation within an audio recording turns toward a staircase, prompting Evy to momentarily question whether the sound came through her headphones or from somewhere inside the house.

Ironically, one of the few areas where Undertone stumbles is that, despite having a podcast-inspired premise, the film is oddly non-committal and, at times, inauthentic in its depiction of the medium. A few key moments range from the hosts taking three days to record a single hour-long episode, to the protagonist shouting, “trace that call!” after a stranger “calls in” to their show. None of this is enough to sink the film, but it is distracting enough to reveal where concessions were made by Tuascon to make the hobby feel “more cinematic.”

And yet, Undertone remains an impressively restrained piece of horror, stripping the genre down to its essentials while staking its place in the growing subgenre of apophenia and internet horror. Anchored by Nina Kiri’s nuanced performance, the film turns the mechanics of paranoia into its central storytelling device through confined spaces and meticulous sound design, showing how fear can be built from the smallest details and distort perception, as the audience is pulled into Evy’s unravelling. With precise direction that emphasizes mood and tension, the film delivers a lean, effective piece of indie filmmaking where the tension is measured in decibels.

still courtesy of VVS Films

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J.A. Birney

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