Undertone is the latest terrifying horror film distributed by A24 and marks the directorial debut of Ian Tuason, who already has plans to turn the film into a trilogy.
The movie follows a podcast host named Evy (Nina Kiri) who lives alone with her ill and dying mother. She co-hosts a podcast, also named “undertone,” in which she and her friend and collaborator Justin (Adam DiMarco), investigate weird and creepy stories.
When Justin shares that he received a strange email including ten audio recordings, they decide to listen to and discuss them during the podcast episodes. But as they listen, Evy begins to experience strange phenomena and paranoia, as if the files have summoned something into her home.
Spoilers ahead for the movie Undertone.
Let’s get into how the film plays out and ultimately ends.
Keep reading to find out more…
During the recording of their podcast, Evy and Justin listen to the audio files included in the email one at a time. They chronicle a couple, Jessa and Mike. Mike wants to convince Jessa that she has been talking in her sleep, so he starts recording at night.
In each file, we hear the next chapter of the couple’s saga. Jessa does indeed talk to herself, and sometimes says creepy things in her sleep or even speaks in reverse at times. When Justin and Evy play it backward, they find out she is saying, “Come in, Abyzou.”
Abyzou is a demon from European and Mediterranean folklore who is often blamed for miscarriages and stillbirths. As she is infertile, she lashes out at mothers out of jealousy. Abyzou can even cause women to murder their own children.
During the tenth and final recording, Evy and Justin hear Jessa on the file trying to warn whoever is listening, seemingly referring to Evy, who we also learn is pregnant.
Additionally, Evy is grappling with some survivor’s guilt and likely religious trauma, believing it is her fault her mom is dying because she stopped praying with her nightly. Since then, she’s stopped eating or speaking.
All hell breaks loose during this last recording, as the co-hosts accept live calls. One person says they were once Mike and Jessa’s neighbor and that they were eventually found dead in their homes with plastic bags on their heads and dead babies drawn on the walls.
In an earlier recording, Jessa has a creepy nighttime doll she keeps inside a plastic bag, and an autopsy revealed she was pregnant when she died.
There are more callers, one of whom wants to speak with “Mary,” the name Evy planned to give her unborn baby. Another one does nothing but taunt Evy and Justin as she reveals the mistake they made was listening to the tenth file, because that’s the one where Abyzou is actually inside and now she’s been unleashed.
They get a call from someone named, “Abby,” likely just Abyzou taunting them, and she kills her baby while on the phone with them.
Ultimately, the final moments of the film descend into chaos as Abyzou comes for Evy with her television get stuck on a creepy viral video they explored in a different podcast episode that allegedly makes people commit suicide.
Then Evy hears banging and screaming and starts to see drawings of dead children all over her walls along with on papers she’d been scribbling on. As she goes upstairs, we see that her mom is up and walking backward toward her before the screen cuts to black and we hear nothing but screams as Evy’s mom, likely possessed, appears to murder her. There are some moments of flashing images that seem to show Evy with a bag on her head, just like what happened to Mike and Jessa, and her mother might also have killed herself after finishing off her daughter.
To make things even scarier, we can hear Evy saying “Come in, Abyzou” in reverse at the very end, in such a way that it feels like she’s cursing the actual audience watching the movie.
As for Justin, his fate is left unclear, but seeing as he’s not present in the house he might have survived. Then again, since he also listened to the tenth file where the demon was lurking, he might not be.
