Undertone is a smart and engaging horror film. With its slow and ominous camera movements, there’s a constant sense of tension created by the knowledge that there may be something lurking just off camera that you are about to catch a glimpse of.

It’s also confined to one location, a home (right here in Toronto). Evy (Nina Kiri) is looking after her dying mother (Michele Duquet) in her family home. It’s dragging out, and in Evy, though she loves her mother, she wants it to be over.

The only thing that keeps her sane is the podcast she works on with her friend Justin (voiced by Adam DiMarco) called Undertone. They are like the Scully and Mulder of the podcast world, and Justin insists he’s got a good one for them to dig into.

He’s received an anonymous email with ten audio files attached. As the pair dig into them, one file at a time, a strange and horrifying experience plays out across Evy’s earphones, and in the home itself.

In the files, we hear Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas) and Mike (Jeff Yung), what starts as a plan to prove Jessa talks in her sleep becomes a horrifying descent into terror and more… Nursery rhymes with backwards messages, and perhaps even a demon… It’s so well constructed.

The further Evy and Justin dig into the files, the stranger things start to occur around the house.

With a sense of dread building through camera movement, framing, lighting and Kiri’s performance, Undertone works fantastically. This is a film you have to pay attention to at all times, and it also works to great benefit if you activate your closed-captions… just in case you miss something in the soundscape (which is brilliantly designed and delivers some solid scares), because there are a lot of them, and it’s incredibly well-constructed.

This one had caught my attention as soon as I’d heard about it, and I couldn’t wait to dig into it. And it’s so well made. Everything works in this one. It doesn’t play down to its audience; it expects you to pay attention, and for those who do, it works fantastically.

It’s smart, and it rests entirely on Kiri’s shoulders, and her performance works incredibly well. Her reactions to the files, and how what she hears begins to affect her, and the environment around her, make it a nice twist on the haunted house story, and the demonic angle is so unnerving.

I really enjoyed this one and highly recommend it.