UNDERTONE

Here's the short version: don't bother. UNDERTONE wants to unsettle you with a folktale about a demon that oppresses mothers and destroys babies, but it spends most of its runtime on scary sounds that never resolve into scares. The pacing drags, especially early on, and the ending arrives as a confusing jumble that answers almost nothing — not the fate of the family on the tapes, not the fate of the two leads, not even the pregnancy crisis the movie spends its second half building toward.

There are Christian touches here — images of Jesus, Mary, and crucifixes in the mother's house, a daughter's guilt over not praying with her before illness struck. But the film never resolves that thread either, and the occult worldview wins out overall. Combine that with heavy profanity and a story that squanders its own tension, and there's little reason to spend your time or money here.

The practical answer: skip it.

Evy, a skeptical atheist, cares for her comatose, dying mother — a devout Catholic — while co-hosting a podcast about unexplained sounds with Justin, based in London. The pair grow fascinated by a medieval folktale: a female demon said to oppress mothers and destroy babies, in and out of the womb. When an anonymous listener sends them strange audio tapes of a family who may have crossed the demon's path, Evy and Justin start digging. Then Evy discovers she's pregnant — and the tapes start to feel less like a story and more like a warning.

Two stars means real problems outweigh what works. The film's slow, measured opening could have built dread the way a patient director sometimes can, but UNDERTONE lingers too long without earning it. The camera pans slowly toward dark backgrounds, teasing figures that never appear — restraint that reads as absence rather than tension. The scares rely almost entirely on escalating strange noises that add up to little or nothing.

Worse, the film abandons its own stakes. Evy's pregnancy, introduced as the story's central threat, never gets the weight it deserves. And the ending resolves almost none of its plot threads — not the fate of the family on the tapes, not Evy and Justin's fates, not the guilt Evy carries over her mother. That vagueness undercuts the two lead performances, particularly Nina Kiri's, and leaves viewers more frustrated than frightened.

UNDERTONE places real Christian imagery on screen — Jesus, the Virgin Mary, crucifixes in the mother's home, memories of a mother urging prayer and church attendance — and then does nothing with it. Evy's guilt over neglecting her dying mother's faith ("I killed my mother," she confesses) is the film's most human moment, and the movie simply drops it, unresolved, like every other thread it raises.

What fills the space instead is a strong occult worldview: a folktale demon researched, discussed, and ultimately left triumphant, with no counter-testimony strong enough to answer it. The film flirts with a pregnancy crisis — Evy considers, then rejects, abortion — but even that moral turn goes nowhere dramatically, robbing the film of the meaning it could have carried.

This is a movie about mothers, babies, and the forces that threaten them, told by filmmakers unwilling to commit to an answer. Scripture is not so timid. The same womb the folktale's demon targets is the one God claims as His own handiwork: "For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb" (Psalm 139:13). Where UNDERTONE offers only dread and static, Scripture offers a Maker who knows every child by name before birth — a truth this film gestures toward and then abandons.

UNDERTONE had real material to work with — a grieving daughter, a mother's faith, a pregnancy under threat — and let almost all of it slip away into unresolved noise. Between the occult worldview, the heavy profanity, and an ending that cheats its own audience, there's little here worth your evening. Our answer stands: skip it. Looking for something better for your next movie night? Start here:.