Okay, I’ll Try to Explain UNDERTONE Movie’s Ending and Plot
If you’ve seen writer/director Ian Tuason’s Undertone movie trailer, then you likely know the concept, but here’s a quick synopsis… because Undertone’s plot is not super clear: while Evangeline (Nina Kiri) serves as her mother’s primary caretaker during her coma, she also co-hosts “The Undertone Podcast.” She and her lifelong friend Justin (Adam DiMarco) examine “all things creepy,” but because it is a podcast, many of the “creepy” elements are auditory like the one that provides Undertone the movie’s plot, or at least its inciting incident. It’s an awesome premise.
Undertone’s official trailer from A24
Justin receives a weird email from a weird address with ten strangely-titled audio files attached, “2TWO,” “3HREE,” “4OUR,” and so on. The message is an equally cryptic possible-acrostic that spells out both “atonement” and “tenet.” Evangeline, the skeptic co-host of the show, assumes that “a kid wrote it,” that it’s “probably a virus,” or “it’s a hoax,” at different points of their listening. The files are definitely freaky—an expecting couple records themselves overnight because pregnant Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas) doesn’t believe Mike (Jeff Yung) when he says she talks in her sleep. The files vary in length and intensity… and we the viewer are along for the ride as Evy and Justin listen to them together and try to explain what’s happening. That’s the premise. The plot of Undertone is a little trickier to explain.
Let me be clear: this is a true horror movie, and it does a lot of things really well. The Foley work alone is a good enough reason to see this movie in the theatre—I saw it in a Dolby house, and I (a woman who co-hosted a podcast in which women of color analyze horror movies, Everything Trying to Kill You) had to alternately plug my ears and close my eyes. The concept is incredible: anyone who’s ever recorded audio knows you have to be in a very quiet room (or closet), you need a mic that picks up like, everything, and you have to wear noise-canceling headphones… which significantly dull your senses to the world around you. Suffice it to say, I would be surprised if Undertone doesn’t win some awards for its sound design.
Nina Kiri. Credit: Dustin Rabin
And honestly, the cinematography was also excellent. It definitely hinges on the horror trope of deep-focus… maybe too much… but there are some excellent steady-cam moments that put us in the first person of someone observing Evangeline record.
The editing, too. Impeccable. I don’t know what else to say except for, I know that a film is edited really well when I don’t focus on it—it’s a shitty thing to admit, but it’s like the syntax of a written work: if it’s doing its job well, the reader doesn’t really notice it.
That said… Undertone’s plot is, to say the least, unclear. To be fair, most of the plot is built around learning new information, and I love that slow-burn technique, but I still found it hazy.
(This is where Undertone movie spoilers start.)
I’m a firm believer that a work of art like a film (or book, or painting), when fully complete, should not have to be explained to someone who is paying attention. That’s why, in my opinion, the script of Undertone was not complete. I don’t mean that to say they didn’t finish the story’s narrative—or at least, I don’t mean only that. I mean, I was terrified while I was watching the movie, but because there were so many plot holes, I could put it out of my mind the moment I left the theater.
As a mother of a young child, that might be for the best for me personally because I think I was its exact target. And by “it,” I mean the demon summoned through listening through those audio files—at least, I think that’s how she was summoned. (BTW, my kid’s middle name is Evangeline, so I’m very much the target audience.)
The film’s plot sets up many possibilities and themes, but none of them truly pays off.
In order to explain the movie’s ending, I dissected the plot where it unravels, and to do that, I (creative writing MFA) ended up more-or-less workshopping the script. Here are my suggestions on how the plot might have been adjusted so that the ending might have delivered:
Lean in to the Pregnancy Psychosis
The back story that they decipher after playing the audio backward was that through the singing of old nursery rhymes like “London Bridge Is Falling Down” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” mothers were unknowingly summoning a demon from European AND(!) Middle Eastern folklore!
I should mention here that Evangeline and her mother practice(d) Catholicism. So, when Evangeline finds out she’s pregnant… inexplicably, days after going in to a doctor’s office, Evangeline receives a phonecall from the doctor himself telling her to “take her time” to “consider her options” at six weeks pregnant.
Let me dismiss these plot points in order: You don’t need a doctor to tell you. You can pee on a stick and a positive result will laugh in your face before you finish washing your hands, and before your missed period. It makes no sense to delay this result. Also, doctors don’t call you themselves unless it is a crazy emergency. OB/GYNs won’t even take a first pregnancy appointment until 8 weeks after a missed period (usually), and by then, you no longer have the option to legally terminate a pregnancy except in the rarest of exceptions. This whole interaction just seems clumsy.
The important takeaways from that exposition are, though, that Evy’s Catholic and has an unwanted, or at least unexpected, pregnancy, and that’s a lot of shame to bear. We also learn that Evangeline had some substance abuse problems, though she only drinks once on screen—and that’s after a particularly traumatic moment where she notices her mother fell out of her coma-bed (!) hours after it happened.
Evangeline is under a lot of stress taking care of her mom, she has new horrendous hormones and an important decision to make, and she’s listening to this horror scene from an expecting couple. It makes perfect sense thematically that she would start to experience auditory hallucinations as a result. This suggestion is maybe the most grounded rewrite of the options I came up with: focus on the auditory hallucinations as a real somatic experience happening through the podcast medium.
By the way, this has happened in real life. One instance of *post*partum psychosis in particular comes to mind, the horrible, awful crimes of Andrea Yates. Who continued to have biological children after multiple psychiatrists advised against it, and who was shamed into not taking her prescribed anti-psychotic medication from her oppressive religious sect. Who then hallucinated demonic voices that told her she was a bad mother, and that to “save” her children from her, she had to drown them in her bathtub. Which she did. That’s a real thing that really happened.
Alas: that’s as far as that element of Undertone’s plot goes.
Lean into the Podcast Format
It really bothers me when the form of a work does not imitate its content: I think that’s why I so seldom enjoy musicals, and the ones I do enjoy are Chicago and Moulin Rouge! in which the protagonists both want to be performers, so it makes sense to tell their stories through songs.
That said: this movie would have worked as a podcast because so much of it is auditory. We also have a small cast and a limited set, which would be conducive to the podcast format, too. The images from the film are creepy on their own, but they’re almost irrelevant to the plot itself.
There are many oblique shots of her mother coming back into herself from her coma, but I failed to see the purpose of that character at all except to keep Evangeline homebound.
Nina Kiri. Credit: Justin Rabin
There’s also the meme “The Undertone Podcast” investigated on their last episode, a video called “I feel wonderful” that causes its viewers to kill themselves. That was fucking freaky. And I hate it. It reminds me of that damn momo doll, and if this movie had been about a visual curse like that, it would have freaked me out so bad I would not have watched it. In that instance, we would have an updated, viral meme sort of like in The Ring or It Follows, which would have worked, too.
We do see a lot of Catholic iconography, too, which The Misfit Pond suggested might be shorthand for the guilt that comes with Evangeline’s pregnancy. And I can buy that… if I knew that was the purpose of the movie. But I don’t know that, because the whole time I have been preoccupied with those ten audio files and what is going to happen to Jessa and Mike and their baby!
Lean into the Jealous Would-Be Mother Folklore
I got so excited when Justin, “The Undertone Podcast” co-host, mentioned that the demon in question was mentioned in European and Middle Eastern folklore. Folklore is my motherfucking jam. I LOVE IT.
But when Justin says the demon is a barren woman who is jealous of other women and drowns their babies, I thought of La Llorona, the weeping ghost from Central American folklore. Her mythology is explained by many reasons: in Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona, her children were killed during the genocide of Guatemala’s indigenous people. In other stories, La Llorona had postpartum psychosis. So that might have been a solid option to explore.
But then Justin mentioned King Solomon. And I thought, Oh hell yeah. Readers, my first introduction to horror media was Catholic Bible stories. I still remember being five-ish years old and my jiddo (Lebanese term for grandfather) told me about those kids who were picking on the prophet Elijah. And then God sent bears to kill and eat those children. “Be sweet. Sweet dreams, doll baby.” Uh… never again?
That said, I know the story of the mothers and King Solomon: there were two new mothers who lived in the same building (community, compound, what have you). One of the infants died. And the mother of that infant claimed the other infant was her own. They brought this issue to King Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, and… well, you remember his solution.
Cut the baby in half. One half goes to each mother.
One mother said, Okay, I know how to share. Cut the baby in half.
The other one says, What, no! Don’t hurt the baby. She can have him! Don’t hurt the baby.
And King Solomon gave custody to the latter, of course. The lesson being, in my synthesis, that regardless of biology, the better mother for the child is the one who would not let him get cut in half!
But, reader. That’s not where Undertone’s plot goes! Instead, it goes to a demon featured in The Testament of Solomon, one of the thirteen apocryphal biblical texts.
That’s an interesting choice, but because so few people have read the apocrypha (well, fewer than the number of people who have read 1 Kings), the word “Abyzou” did not ring any bells. In fact, when Evangeline went to google it, I was like: “Oh OKAY, THAT’S how you spell it!? She just got that anglicized spelling right the first try?
The only information we get in the film itself is that in King Solomon’s time, Abyzou was a barren woman who was so jealous of other people’s babies that she would drown or kill them. According to the film, King Solomon had her hanged for it.
Courtesy of A24
She’s the one seemingly possessing the pregnant women/new mothers who call in to the podcast live, later. And she seems to be possessing Evangeline, based on the crayon drawings and creepy occurrences like the lights flickering and sink turning off and on.
But if that is the case, and Evangeline unknowingly invited the demon… why? Why would she do that? Why would any of them do that? And is it on them if they conjure her unknowingly? The memoir, The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist by Matt Baglio, a Catholic priest who was trained as an exorcist, says that they are not.
And either way, Evangeline, who is unexpectedly pregnant and maybe considering terminating her pregnancy… is that the one who should be the focus of this story? I don’t know. In a pattern consistent with recent A24 movies, Undertone introduces a lot of interesting themes, and then fails to land the plane on any one of them.
Undertone releases in theatres Friday, March 13.
If this story stuck with you, then you might also like these…
—This Lost Ring of Ancient Mythology is Believed to Have Mystical Powers
—THE BRIDE! Finds Her Voice by Upsetting Genre Narratives, from Creature Feature to Noir Film to Hollywood Musical
—7 Fascinating Pieces Of Jewish Folklore In ATTACHMENT
— “Postpartum Psychosis Horror Story: Andrea Yates” on The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told
