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.

Related: Movie Review: BANK OF DAVE: THE LOAN RANGER
Related: Movie  Review: SCARED TO DEATH
Related: Movie  Review: BODYCAM
Related: Movie  Review: “THE BRIDE!”
Related: Movie  Review: NFT: CURSED IMAGESRelated: Movie  Review: SCREAM 7
Related: Movie  Review: OPERATION TACO GARY’S
Related: Movie  Review: ANACORETA
Related: Movie  Review: THIS IS NOT A TEST
Related: Movie  Review: GHOST TRAIN
Related: Movie  Review: COLD STORAGE
Related: Movie  Review: THE HAUNTED FOREST
Related: Movie  Review: “WUTHERING HEIGHTS” 
Related: Movie  Review: THE MORTUARY ASSISTANT
Related: Movie  Review: THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 3
Related: Movie  Review: PILLION
Related: Movie  Review: JIMPA
Related: Movie  Review: ISLANDS
Related: Movie  Review: WORLDBREAKER
Related: Movie  Review: MOTHER OF FLIES
Related: Movie  Review: 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE
Related: Movie  Review: NIGHT PATROL
Related: Movie  Review: THE CONFESSION (2026)
Related: Movie  Review: WE BURY THE DEAD
Related: Movie  Review: ANACONDA
Related: Movie  Review: AVATAR: FIRE AND  ICE
Related: Movie  Review: IS THIS THING ON?
Related: Movie  Review: MANOR OF DARKNESS
Related: Movie  Review: DUST BUNNY

Follow us on Twitter at ASSIGNMENT X
Like us on Facebook at ASSIGNMENT X

Article Source: Assignment X
Article: Movie  Review: UNDERTONE

Related

Related Posts:

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.

If you see one spicy depraved satirical thriller this year that’s a cross between “Mean Girls” and “The Craft” and something far darker, by all means make that movie “Forbidden Fruits.” It’s an agreeably sharp-witted black-as-midnight comedy about four young women from Texas who work in a clothing-and-knickknack boutique at the Highland Place mall. They aren’t just friends; they’re part of a coven. Does that mean they’re actually witches? Maybe, maybe not.

What we can say for sure is that they’re shopping junkies obsessed with signifiers of their femininity (skimpy chemises, bracelets with charms, designer cupcakes), that their banter is peppered with the kind of slang (gorge, perf, vom) you’d expect from a movie that has Diablo Cody as one of the producers, that at one point they do a willowy dance to an EDM cover of Bryan Adams’ “Heaven,” and that three of them are under the spell of their ringleader, Apple (Lili Reinhart), a cold vixen in long straight red hair and stiletto heels who controls their every move with agendas of her own.

Each of the girls is named for a different fruit. In addition to Apple, there’s Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), who in earlier age would have been the “ditz,” because she’s got a sensual innocence (she spends every Wednesday afternoon boinking a different dude from the food court), but she’s actually as sharp-tongued as the rest of them. There’s Fig (Alexandra Shipp), the most serious and skeptical. And there’s the mysterious newbie, Pumpkin (Lola Tung), who’s working at a candied-pretzel store called Sister Salt’s when Apple taps her to join the coven (though she doesn’t put it quite that way). She leads Pumpkin into the girls’ shared immersion in the ways of fashion and jargon and backbiting, their filtering of life through a scrim of pop, and the way that Apple layers her “sisterly” directives with an academic feminist righteousness. That, in fact, is what makes the film original — its perception that for these girls, progressive anger is now inseparable from fashion. 

If they are in fact witches, what’s the witchcraft about? In comedies like “The Craft” or “Practical Magic,” witchcraft has mostly been a free-floating expression of female power. But in “Forbidden Fruits,” Apple, the group’s Regina George, uses her status as head witch to enforce her rules about the way things should be. (You’re only allowed to text a dude using emojis.) Periodically, she’ll send one of her comrades into the dressing room that serves as a “confessional,” where the one you’re confessing to is the spirit of Marilyn Monroe. Why Marilyn? Because Apple considers her the ultimate female martyr, and says “no one could control her, not even the president.” Apple has a JFK assassination theory about Marilyn. According to the theory, Marilyn was murdered — by JFK — precisely because she couldn’t be controlled. In Apple’s eyes, the ghost of Marilyn now hovers over every dance of power between a man and a woman.

Cherry, promiscuous and confused, actually seems to have a bit of Marilyn in her. But what of the others? As Fig pursues a romance, which Apple tries to squelch, we realize that Apple, with her fear and loathing of men, is a witch of the spirit. Yet Lili Reinhart plays her with a diamond-hard smirk and a gleam of perception that lights up the screen. She’s like Parker Posey crossed with Ann-Margret. She has the potential to go far.        

At first, cued by everything in “Forbidden Fruits” that’s reminiscent of those earlier films, we think it’s all for fun: a high-camp giggle trip. But the film’s first-time director, Meredith Alloway (who co-wrote the script with Lily Houghton), has a vision that’s less facile and more contemporary than that. She has made a screw-loose comedy of stylized youth attitudes that doesn’t pretend to be “real,” but it’s also a serious movie that asks: What do young women today want? Love or justice or power? Or all three? And is any one of the three more powerful?

The movie takes a turn into suspense when Apple leads the others in putting a hex on someone, and the hex appears to work. What happens is unnerving, at which point the film passes through a looking glass of fear. There’s something new at work — a cultural hairpin turn — in the way that Apple is made out to be a figure of commanding but toxic damage. “Forbidden Fruits” goes over-the-top into shock and violence (which is staged with great wit), but what drives the movie forward is how it tries to pull its characters out from under the influence of someone whose witchery has made men the enemy. The movie says: It’s time to break that spell.