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When I interviewed the “Undertone” team, including filmmaker Ian Tuason and stars Nina Kiri and Adam DiMarco, at our Sundance studio back in January, I delighted in telling the trio that I saw the film entirely alone in a tiny screening room.
For a film about isolation, one that mostly hinges on Kiri putting on a sort of one-woman show, it was a fitting setting. But for a film that also delights in the smallest of movements and the loudest of noises, it was a little risky. I was freaked out! I kept expecting someone to jump out at me! OK, so, yes, a pretty good arrangement for a seriously spooky film.
Kiri, who plays Evy in the film, agrees. Sort of. For Kiri, best known for her work in series like “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy” and the lauded Canadian feature “Out Standing,” any way you see the film is the right way to see it. But home sounds good. Just, you know, for the safety.
And, potentially, the thematic tie-in. Tuason’s film, which is based on some of his own experiences and was shot in the very house where they occurred, follows podcaster Evy as she navigates a particularly fraught time in her life. While she spends her evenings recording her occult-centric podcast with her longtime friend Justin (DiMarco, who we only ever hear in the film) in the dining room, in an upstairs bedroom, her beloved mother (Michèle Duquet) is slowly dying.
Against that backdrop of very real terror, a different story starts to unspool, as Justin shares a series of recordings with Evy that have been sent to the podcast. As the duo attempt to untangle their meaning — they hinge on a couple, Jessa and Mike, who are dealing with a pregnancy gone awry and a slow slip into madness — Evy seems to fall under the thrall of whatever it was that haunted their subjects.
The film premiered at the genre-centric Fantasia International Film Festival last summer, where it kicked up so much noise that A24 bought the feature and is now releasing it in theaters on the primo scary date of Friday the 13th. Ahead, IndieWire spoke with Kiri about putting on a very terrifying one-hander, why she always knew the film was good, and what she thinks happens to Evy in the film’s final moments (without spoilers, basically).
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
IndieWire: The film was a smash hit at Fantasia last summer and just screened at Sundance, so more people are seeing it and talking about it every day. Are you getting excited for it to finally be out in theaters?
Nina Kiri: I am getting really excited. Every time a new batch of people watches it, and I can sense that they’re getting what we were hoping they would get from the movie, I’m just like, this is really satisfying.
When I saw you guys at Sundance, I told you that I watched it literally alone in the A24 screening room.
Yesterday, when we were doing the interviews, I was basically telling people to watch it at home, and they were like—
No!
They were like, “Theaters.” I’m like, “Torrent it.” [Laughs] No! Kidding! I really think watching it alone is also a part of the experience. I feel like if I had to choose between [theaters or home alone], well, no, because the sound is so good in theaters, you kind of have to experience it [that way]. It’s such an experience, but it’s a different experience on its own that’s just as good.
‘Undertone’A24You mentioned anticipation about people watching it and getting the feeling that you wanted them to have, so what do you want audiences to feel? What do you want them to experience?
First of all, it’s such a personal story, and it was done in such a personal way, all of us doing it at Ian’s house. It was 16 of us there — really, really small, bare bones, independent filmmaking. It felt really pure. The intentions felt really pure, and everybody wanted to service the story that was based on something that was really difficult that happened in Ian’s life. I really hope that people feel the pureness of that story. There’s no gimmicks or bells and whistles to this story.
When I say there’s no gimmicks or bells and whistles, it’s a telling of an experience of real horror, losing a parent, taking care of a parent, Catholic guilt on top of that, parental guilt. Am I being good? Have I prayed enough? Did I service my parents like I should have? Did I take care of them like I should have? I think that is a true real-life horror. I hope that the personal aspects and the purity of those intentions are felt by the audience.
At what point in your discussions with Ian did he tell you, “Hey, this is based on my own experience. And, also, I want to shoot it in my own home where this actually happened”?
Really early on, because in the director’s statement, he was talking about his experiences caretaking and how that informed it and the guilt aspect. But what’s interesting is that, even when things are about us, we don’t always see everything about us. So, he can’t tell me, because he doesn’t see some of the ways that he got through things.
First, he’s telling me this information, and I’m hearing it from him, and then I’m coming to my [own conclusions while reading the script], like, “Oh, I think this person is in denial.” And I told him that, and he’s like, “Whoa.” But he’s not going to know that, because it’s himself.
The other thing is that when I think about Evy, even though it’s based on Ian, there has to be elements of me that I can relate and bring to that. I know there’s been so many times in my life where I don’t have the mental capacity to get through something, and I have to be in denial until I’m in a place where I can actually approach it. And then I was noticing with the movie, I’m like, “The more and more fucked up things get, the more Evy tries to push it away and the more she cannot just look in the mirror and face what’s really going on.” I believe that when we do that, it leads to dissent. It leads to madness.
There’s a scene in the movie in which Evy leaves, and she goes to a party, and it’s so easy to watch it and be like, “Oh, my God, why would she do this? What if the worst possible thing happens while she’s gone?”
It’s really heartbreaking. And the sadness of coming home to Mama being on the ground was so real to me. There was no needing to wonder. It just was inherent. We did the scene, and I’m like, “Oh, this is painful.” That actually happened to Ian when he was caretaking for his mom, he left for not very long and he came back and something had gone wrong and he’s like, “It was the worst feeling. It was just like I needed to leave in order to have the strength to come back and face what was going on. But because I left, I wasn’t there, and this bad thing happened, and now I feel guilty again, and now we’re back at the beginning.”
So much of it feels like a loop to me. Just like the denial is a loop, the guilt is also a loop.
On the set of ‘Undertone’DUSTIN RABINMost of this film is just you. You have some scenes with Michèle, and then Adam is on the phone and Zoom. What’s the first feeling when you realize this is essentially a one-woman show?
I think my own way of denying my genuine fear was [that] I really focused on the lines. We did all of the Justin scenes in the first week, and so many of those scenes were 20 pages in a row, and it’s just a continuous shot. I’m thinking like, “Oh, I basically have to do a one-act play every day. I’m not going to be able to. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” I was really getting nervous about the lines. I was telling my mom, “I can’t memorize lines. I only have a week.”
I was shooting the very last episode ever of “The Handmaid’s Tale” the week before, I was doing a short over the weekend, so I didn’t have the full spectrum of time. I worked 17 days in a row, and I was like, “I won’t be able to do it. I won’t be able.” My mom was like, “You have a golden bubble, and nothing can go wrong within that bubble.”
I think I was nervous, and that nervousness manifested in me thinking about the lines, the lines, the lines. And then once I got there and we started doing all the scenes, I was like, “Everybody here is down to be there for me, and I can feel them lifting me. I can feel it.”
You do also get to play different kinds of Evys. Just Evy alone. Evy with her mom. Podcast Evy has a different sort of character she takes on. Did you listen to true crime or occult podcasts to get into that aspect of her?
I’m not a true crime girly, but I am a podcast listener. “Heavyweight” is my favorite podcast. I don’t listen to true crime. There was a moment, because I do listen to podcasts, that I was like, “Oh, I’m going to try and listen to a few true crime ones just to see what the vibe is.” But as soon as I listened, I was like, “I don’t want this to infiltrate me, because I think ours is so different than this.”
But the one thing I took from it is, so often in podcasts, it’s like one person takes on one persona, the other person the other persona. I think the levity that Adam brings is so important, because I think I’m so intense, and Ian’s so intense. It was really helpful to have a person who’s more light, and it was so easy to have a rapport with him, because he already comes with such familial energy.
Was Adam on set for any of the production?
When we shot the scenes where I’m talking to him, that was with an acting double who was upstairs in the room, Ryan Turner. He was also amazing. He ended up playing Darren. When Adam came on board, we ended up doing it during two days of reshoots. There were some, maybe two or three scenes, that were reshot that were live with Adam upstairs. All the levity and all the relationship that you see, that was developed more in the reshoots, and those scenes are in the movie.
‘Undertone’DUSTIN RABINWhen you listened to the recordings that Evy and Justin are listening to, was it all in one go, or was it in the movie, where you break it up over different episodes?
It was breaking it up, and it was over the first five days of doing the movie. I’d hear them again, obviously. The first time we’d shoot it, I’d be like, “Oh, my God.” And then it was like hearing it over and over. And at this point, I’ve heard it so many times, there’s certain parts of those recordings that come back to me randomly. That recording is so raw, it’s so realistic. It’s such high-level acting and such high-level scene-making.
You have done a lot of scary things in your career so far. “Handmaid’s Tale,” that one’s definitely up there! What is it about these kinds of projects that is exciting for you as a person and as a performer?
What’s exciting about being scared? [Laughs] I’m so proud of these types of projects, because they come from minds that are questioning what’s going on in the world and wanting to push back on that, whether that has to do with society or political or just with being a person. I’m getting to work on things that have to do with the struggle of humanity, or just your own humanity, and dealing with yourself.
When I was looking over some of your credits, I thought, “Oh, yeah, Nina likes horror things, final girl stuff!” No spoilers, but how do you think that kind of thinking contextualizes Evy at the end of the film?
I think there’s a transcendence. I think people could see that in any way. I don’t actually even know if I would categorize it as positive or negative. It’s just a transcendence. It almost feels like Ian turns [the story] like this and then stretches it in another dimension. I don’t know if you caught it, but Mike and Jessa are in that house, and so there’s a moment where Jessa goes, “I saw her, and it’s like she’s talking about me.”
She’s not talking about the baby.
No, and we start to mesh. And I think that’s why I say I think Evy transcends, because I think there are so many more stretches of that story than that’s shown in this one, in this movie.
When we talked at Sundance, Ian was so funny, basically saying, “Oh, yeah, I always knew it was going to get bought by A24 or something.” And this tiny labor of love, truly indie filmmaking, is indeed coming out from A24 with all that entails and implies. What does that feel like?
It feels really validating. It’s like that feeling of, “I know what this is for me, I know what this felt like making it, and I know how good it is,” but so often in this career, you know you can know it, and other people don’t see it, and you kind of have to make peace with that. It’s so validating, like, “I knew it. I fucking knew it.”
A24 will release “Undertone” in theaters on Friday, March 13.
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