By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: March 17th, 2026 / 10:20 PM

Rating: R
Stars: Nina Kiri, Adam DiMarco, Michèle Duquet, Keana Lyn Basidas, Jeff Yung
Writer: Ian Tuason
Director: Ian Tuason
Distributor: A24
Release Date: March 13, 2026

Viewers may not want to play classic lullabies backwards – or maybe even forwards – after watching UNDERTONE. This low-budget indie uses sound and suggestion, along with disturbing subtext, to create a cumulatively unnerving experience.

Evie (Nina Kiri) is the caretaker for her extremely religious, bedridden and dying mother (Michèle Duquet). By the look of it, Evie is doing a good job, in that her mother is clean and comfortable. Evie stays home, seldom leaving their two-story house that is adorned everywhere with Catholic statues and imagery.

But Mother hasn’t eaten or spoken in the past two days as UNDERTONE opens, and Evie is preparing for the end. One of Evie’s few pleasures is the exploring-odd-phenomena podcast “Undertone” she does with her friend Justin (Adam DiMarco). The two haven’t seen each other in years and he lives in another country now, but they have an easy rapport with each other.

For the “Undertone” podcast, Evie plays the skeptic and Justin the believer, exaggerations of their real-life stances. When Justin receives ten audio files from an unknown sender, Evie’s first reaction is that he should delete them, as they probably contain viruses. This may well be the case, although the virus isn’t the kind that wrecks computers.

The files present to us a couple, Jessa (Keana Lyn Basidas) and Mike (Jeff Yung). Mike has taken to recording Jessa to prove to her that she is not just talking but in fact singing children’s songs in her sleep. By what seems to be coincidence, Evie has been singing “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” around the house.

Research enthusiast Justin gets to the roots of these lullabies and others. The results are alarming. They’re worse when played in reverse. Sometimes all of us – that’s Evie, Justin, and the audience – can hear the words; sometimes it’s a mixture of who can and who can’t.

Writer/director Ian Tuason demonstrates great comprehension of the alarming power of sounds and sights that we can’t fully grasp. It’s like walking downstairs and missing a step by an inch. We’re straining to make sense of input that we’re still processing when some other eerie development surfaces.

Tuason bases his horror in ancient folklore. We don’t need to be religious ourselves to understand why this is happening in this household. Even some of Mom’s little knick-knacks are illustrative of what we’re being told.

There’s also a carefully-threaded theme running through UNDERTONE about certain unspoken terrors that almost everyone has to face, albeit usually not so quite drastically as in this film.

Evie has her secrets, but she’s not an unreliable narrator. As the audience sees things that she does not, we aren’t dependent on her perspective. It’s more that she’s so run down by circumstances when we meet her that we fear she doesn’t have the strength to fight for herself.

Kiri has a charismatic presence that makes her an unassuming but natural focal point. DiMarco supplies ready comradely cheer.

Such is the immersive quality of UNDERTONE that only when it’s done do we step back and appreciate the skill (and financial/temporal restraint) with which it has been made. It leaves us agitated and jumpy, which is a hallmark of well-crafted horror.

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Now entering the pantheon of lost-and-alone movies is “Project Hail Mary,” a hugely entertaining — and just plain huge — surprise during a depressing month that’s typically Hollywood’s dumping ground for wince-worthy trash.

It hits you like an asteroid, watching what amounts to a bona fide summer blockbuster smack dab in the middle of March, just when we’re sick of hearing about the same 10 Oscar movies over and over again.

Wiping the cinematic slate clean, Amazon’s big swing is an old-school outer-space adventure with a contemporary attitude and enough creative touches to lend it a new-car smell.

It’s a lovably weird story with hopelessly stranded hints of “The Martian,” “Life of Pi” and “Cast Away.” And, yes, there’s a Wilson — albeit an actually alive one.

The wizards of odd here are directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller of “The Lego Movie” and the “Spider-Verse” series. I’ve never met them, but their work suggests they’re the sort of guys you’d wanna meet in the William Shatner autograph line at a “Star Trek” convention.

Their quirky latest has heart, sci-fi thrills, funny jokes and stupendous special effects worthy of its staggering price tag — reportedly $248 million. That’s more than some island nations’ GDPs. Yet even though it ranks among the most expensive movies ever made, “Mary” is cozy and genuinely adorable.

The film’s enormous appeal starts with star Ryan Gosling.

Not that Gosling needs to be sold as a leading man at this stage in his career, but this is the first time I’ve been convinced he really is one.

He’s funny, obviously. The actor always comes prepared with that Paul Rudd prankster energy. Or, rather, Ken-ergy. And while he’s been plenty emotional in the past in films such as “The Notebook,” “La La Land” and “Blade Runner 2049,” gravitas hasn’t been his forte. He’s a goof.

His “Project Hail Mary” character, Ryland Grace, finally lets Gosling explore the full palette of his abilities. The stakes for Grace are much greater than sky-high. He has the unenviable task of saving humanity from an existential threat while solo in the vast cosmos far from home.

At the film’s start, he wakes up from a medically induced coma on a spaceship — like Ripley in “Alien” only with fewer exploding abdomens — shaggy, confused and years away from Earth. The other two crewmen are dead.

Flashbacks throughout show how Grace was plucked from obscurity as a high school physics teacher to help on a top-secret government effort — Project Hail Mary, run by Sandra Hüller’s Eva.

The German actress is the movie’s secret sauce. Her role isn’t giant, but she gives Eva more mystery and moral complexity than most other actresses could manage.

Eva’s mission is to stop some unexplained organisms called astrophage from “eating” the sun. The “red dots’” appetite has given humans about 30 years left to live. Tops. But the group has discovered a unique planet 13 lightyears away from Earth that’s somehow immune to their devastation.

Clearly that’s where Grace has been sent to figure out how this world is surviving, but the circumstances of why he’s actually there are blurry till the end. The twist is a meaty one.

This is when things get cute. While attempting to complete his research mission, Grace makes contact with an alien.

When the two species have their initial encounter, Lord and Miller mine Spielbergian chills that bring to mind “E.T.” But they also treat it as an intergalactic Tinder date. It’s silly.

The second half of “Project Hail Mary” becomes a man-and-alien buddy comedy that will have the upcoming “Mandalorian and Grogu” sweating.

His extraterrestrial pal is Rocky, a spider-like rock creature whose world is also being ravaged by the astrophage. Together, maybe they can stop the infestation.

Rocky is the lovechild of R2-D2 and the Grand Canyon; a clay-colored, curious, beep-boop rascal whose speech Grace eventually is able to translate. Before we get to know him, Rocky is a little freaky. Good on the designers for making a movie and not just a lucrative Christmas stocking stuffer.

The little guy is, I’ll admit, somewhat farfetched. As is how fast Grace figures how to interpret his clicky language, as are the rapidly rattled off scientific explanations for astrophage and the experiments the duo conduct. “Project Hail Mary” makes “The Martian” look like a Scientific American cover story.

I didn’t really mind the ridiculousness, though. The film is so much fun. It tugs at the heartstrings often, and Rocky is so brilliantly animated to the point of complete believability. Gosling is great. 

And, during a moment in which movies tend to be either cynically corporate or bleaker than a black hole, “Project Hail Mary” dares to be about that once-great driver of drama: friendship.

Stephen Sondheim’s death in 2021, at 91, was a gut punch to musical theater fans. Showered with honors and tributes, he had begun to seem eternal, a cultural constant. Even his gnarliest shows enjoyed successful revivals — more acclaimed, and more profitable, than their original productions. His influence and mentorship shaped a new generation of theatrical composers that included Adam Guettel (“The Light in the Piazza”), Jason Robert Brown (“Parade”), Jeanine Tesori (“Fun Home”), Jonathan Larson (“Rent”) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (“Hamilton”).

The most secular of Jews, Sondheim is now the subject of a biography in Yale University Press’ excellent Jewish Lives series. Its author, Daniel Okrent, was the New York Times’ first public editor and has written acclaimed books on topics such as immigration and Prohibition.

Okrent never met Sondheim, he tells us, but he had some near misses: He sat near the composer in the theater on more than one occasion and was even mistaken for him. For “Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy,” Okrent spent three years absorbing the literature, interviewing collaborators and friends, and probing the archives. He cites a particular debt to biographer Meryle Secrest’s extensive taped interviews, from the mid-1990s, with Sondheim and others.

The resulting volume is a brisk, engaging read that avoids hagiography. Okrent highlights the emotional frailties that coexisted with the brilliance and generosity. He seeks to liberate Sondheim’s reputation from the encrustation of myth and to demystify his relationships, while offering a succinct analysis of his achievements. That’s a tall order for a compact book, especially given its subject’s long, complicated life. Okrent’s failings are, unsurprisingly, primarily those of omission.

The general outlines of Sondheim’s story are well known. The precocious only child of two acrimoniously divorced parents, he benefited from the mentorship of his Bucks County, Pa., neighbor, Oscar Hammerstein II. Sondheim enjoyed early success, in the late 1950s, as the lyricist for “West Side Story” and “Gypsy,” but chafed at the limitations of the role. He vastly preferred writing music.

With a variety of collaborators, including Hal Prince, George Furth, John Weidman, Hugh Wheeler and James Lapine, he went on to forge a distinctive legacy as both a composer and lyricist. His shows, including “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Sweeney Todd,” “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Into the Woods,” mined the darkness and complexities of human relationships, deployed diverse forms of storytelling, and expanded the possibilities of the Broadway musical.

Okrent’s subtitle, “Art Isn’t Easy,” is a lyric from Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George.” The 1984 musical, inspired by the painter Georges Seurat’s 1886 pointillist masterpiece “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” explored the rigors and rewards of the artistic process.

There are some surprises here. While Sondheim spoke about using alcohol as a creative lubricant, Okrent goes further. Quoting Lapine and others, he concludes that Sondheim was an unrepentant alcoholic, as well as a prolific user of marijuana and cocaine. He kept drinking, Okrent says, even after at least two heart attacks.

For years, Sondheim dated men casually, without commitment. Only late in life did he find two serious loves, the songwriter Peter Jones and then the producer Jeff Romley, 50 years his junior, whom he married. That union brought him contentment, Okrent says.

Okrent also takes seriously Sondheim’s “emotionally intimate” relationships with women. Among them were Mary Rodgers, daughter of composer Richard Rodgers, who chronicled her devotion in the memoir “Shy;” the actress Lee Remick, whom Okrent says Sondheim truly loved; and the producer-director Hal Prince’s wife, Judy, an artistic muse with whom he may have talked daily. Her disinclination (along with Romley’s) to cooperate with biographers leaves an unfortunate gap in the record.

One of the myths Okrent tackles involves Sondheim’s supposed rupture with Judy’s husband, whose vision had helped fuel shows such as “Company,” “Follies” and “A Little Night Music.” After the spectacular failure, in 1981, of “Merrily We Roll Along,” Sondheim turned to new collaborators. But, according to Okrent, the friendship remained largely intact. (A final, years-long collaboration with Prince, on the musical “Bounce” — later called “Road Show” — never made it to Broadway.)

Okrent portrays Sondheim as witty and endearing, but also poorly groomed, remote, caustic, quick to anger — and, mostly, quick to forgive. One exception was the case of the prickly Arthur Laurents (librettist for “West Side Story” and “Gypsy”), a longtime friend and sometime foe whose request for a deathbed visit Sondheim spurned. By contrast, Sondheim was consistently accessible and encouraging to younger composers and lyricists even as his own artistic output sputtered.

One of his most embattled relationships was with his mother, known as Foxy. She famously bemoaned his birth in a cruel letter, which Okrent suggests Sondheim may have misquoted. But it was through her machinations that he met Hammerstein, a debt he repaid by supporting her financially through much of her life.

The biography’s brevity is necessarily limiting. While Okrent mentions that the recent Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” fetched high ticket prices, he doesn’t detail the reasons for its success. (Director Maria Friedman re-envisioned the show as a memory play, and cast the supremely likable Jonathan Groff as the corrupt composer Franklin Shepard, ruefully reflecting on his past.)

Okrent touches on Sondheim’s faltering efforts to complete his final musical, with David Ives, “Here We Are.” But he says nothing about its posthumous Off Broadway production, in 2023, which played to packed houses and mixed reviews — not quite the valedictory Sondheim would have wanted.

In Sondheim’s body of work, Okrent searches for the autobiographical resonances that Sondheim himself mostly disdained. He likens the composer to both the emotionally disengaged protagonist, Bobby, of “Company,” who struggles with ambivalence, and (more surprisingly) the vengeful barber Sweeney Todd, whose demons drove him to murder. Sondheim’s were instead tamed by his art, Okrent suggests, which shaped his “textured, contradictory, troubling, and gratifying life.”

Klein is a Philadelphia-based cultural critic and reporter.