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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An acclaimed author and historian of the libertarian movement fell to his death last week, his employer confirmed.

The body of Brian Doherty, 57, senior editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, was found Thursday “after a fall” in the Battery Yates park portion of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the publication wrote.

The National Parks Service’s law enforcement agency confirmed it responded to an incident at Battery Yates on Thursday “involving a male visitor who reportedly fell from the cliffside into the water.”

“The individual was recovered and pronounced dead,” said Scott Carr, parks service spokesperson, in an email. “We do not have any further information to share at this time.”

Doherty was the author of several books, with Reason saying his most notable work was the 2007 study “Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.”

“Doherty has rescued libertarianism from its own obscurity,” the Wall Street Journal wrote of the work, “eloquently capturing the appeal of the ‘pure idea.’”

Libertarianism’s role in gun control and the courts was the subject of his works, and Doherty had no shortage of admirers.

Loren Dean, chair of the Libertarian Party of California, said it was Doherty’s work at Reason that brought him into the liberty movement.

“Brian Doherty was the best kind of libertarian: one who holds true to the principles of liberty as they are,” Dean said in an email. “He was a tireless champion of both gun rights and police reform who wrote books on both [former U.S. Rep.] Ron Paul and Burning Man; his work did not sit on either the ‘left’ or ‘right’ side of the authoritarian box, but delightfully outside that tired frame, where libertarian principles truly sing.”

Doherty began working at Reason in 1994, according to the publication’s obituary, left the company and returned in 2000 at the behest of Nick Gillespie, then editor in chief.

“What I liked most about Brian was his abiding interest in things happening on the margins of American culture, politics, and thought, and his deep appreciation for the prodigious bounty that markets deliver reliably and without moralizing,” Gillespie wrote in his farewell to Doherty, who had many opinion pieces published in The Times.

Far from just heady subjects, Doherty covered “both libertarian and whimsical” subcultures, according to the obituary, including New Hampshire’s Free State Project and the Seasteaders, a growing community of individuals dedicated to living on the seas.

The Seasteading Institute tweeted its condolences and noted the group had “appreciated his coverage of seasteading over the years.”

Doherty was a native of Queens, N.Y., majored in journalism at the University of Florida and joined the college’s libertarian group in 1987, according to Reason’s obituary.

He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s and joined a group known as the Cacophony Society, a gang that “inspired or created phenomenon ranging from the novel/movie Fight Club to urban exploration, billboard alteration, the Yes Men, flash mobs, and ‘Santa Rampages,’” according to the obituary.

One of those projects translated into the formation of the annual Burning Man festival, the obituary stated. Doherty later chronicled the famed artsy, hippie-like festival in his book “This Is Burning Man.”

“Libertarians talk a lot about freedom and responsibility. Brian embodied both,” Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward said in his obituary. “His weird, colorful life — filled with comics and festivals and music and books — was a model of life lived freely and openly.”

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.