Feeling almost entirely isolated from the world, Evy pours her all into the Undertone podcast with her longtime friend Justin, with the pair suddenly receiving an email with 10 mysterious audio files and an invitation to listen to them on the air. As they begin listening to the files, which are a series of recordings from young couple Mike and Jessa to capture her sleep-talking behaviors, Evy begins experiencing her own series of hallucinations and hauntings seemingly tied to a malevolent entity.
Alongside Kiri, the cast for the film includes Adam DiMarco, The Virgin Suicides' Michèle Duquet, The Hardy Boys' Keana Lyn Bastidas and Jeff Yung. Hailing from debuting writer/director Ian Tuason, Undertone has garnered largely positive reviews from critics since its 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival, currently holding a 77% "Certified Fresh" approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
In honor of the film's wide release, ScreenRant's Grant Hermanns interviewed Ian Tuason, Nina Kiri and Adam DiMarco to discuss Undertone. The stars opened up about the movie's unique filming format with the audio-driven experience and how it helped them become further immersed in the terrors of the movie, as well as the most chilling sound they heard during production.
Where most movies, even ones with the smallest of rosters, have at least a handful of on-screen performers, Undertone's cast is rare in that Kiri is the only on-screen performer with speaking lines, with her mother, played by Duquet, being silent throughout the film. In reflecting on shouldering the weight of the movie's on-screen work, Kiri, at the start, "was worried about technical things" for the A24 horror movie, including if "I would be able to have everything memorized."
Nina Kiri: But then once I started prepping, and I was talking to Ian a lot about who Evy is as a character, and where she's coming from, why she does what she does. It just became exciting and fun. And I think because there were so little people on set, so little amount of actors, not a lot of crew, there was this feeling like the burden was shared by everyone, not just on me.
Explaining that "the cycle of energy just falls on you" when filming a scene without any other actors, she just "had to create it and then just put it out" on set. The Undertone star went on to praise that everybody in the production "was there for me to give me the energy I needed" for filming any given scene, even occasionally "mak[ing] eye contact" with the occasional crew member "just to connect" to something.
On the other side of this unique filming format is DiMarco, whose performance came entirely from vocal recordings as he and Evy talk over the phone while recording their eponymous podcast. Despite never being seen on screen, the Overcompensating vet revealed he "was lucky enough to actually be on set for a couple of days" and recorded much of his audio on location. More notably, DiMarco performed his recordings "in Ian's adolescent bedroom with a live monitor to Nina," which he found "helped get into character":
Adam DiMarco: The way they had it set up, I did feel like I was actually running my own podcast with the mic. I had two laptops. One of them had just the Undertone key art on it. It had a red glow on me to kind of put me in the headspace. So no, it did feel pretty real. And then just even going into the sound booth to do pickups and run everything again, just getting to explore the space and just be physical with it, I think helped me a lot with the voice side of things.
Looking at the film's terrifying audio spectrum, and which sounds they found unnerved them the most, both stars pointed to the mysterious audio recordings that their characters listen to, with Kiri describing them as being "really unsettling." DiMarco went on to describe that they "had such a texture to them" and that they "felt really real to me when I was listening to them," even choosing to wait to listen to them "until we were recording for the first time" in order to have an authentic reaction.
Tuason went on to share that part of this real feeling behind the Undertone recordings was thanks to the fact they were "recorded on an actual iPhone with the actors running around." Kiri concluded by describing them as being "so raw" and finding a way to work their way into the listener's imagination and leave a haunting impact on them:
Nina Kiri: It feels like someone just sent it to you, and then that's unsettling, because it enters your — sound is so intimate, especially if you're listening with headphones. It's just something as if it's happening right beside you or around you that, especially, those recordings brought.
Undertone is now in theaters!
Release Date
March 13, 2026
Runtime
84 minutes
Director
Ian Tuason
Writers
Ian Tuason
Producers
Cody Calahan, Dan Slater
Cast
-
-
Kristen Holden-Ried
Justin
English (US) ·