Undertone (2025)

Premise: Evy has moved and is taking care of her very very ill, very very religious, very very basically-dead mother. She (Evy, not her mother) is one of the two hosts of this spooky paranormal podcast, she plays the Scully to her friend’s Justin’s Mulder. Then one week they receive these audio files in an email, they start playing them and they’re spoooooooky and also… relatable!? Ruh-roh.

Under 90 minutes? a tiny bit over that
Do they say the title? Yeah, it’s the name of the podcast.

First thing I thought of:

Okay, more: Loyal readers of this, your favourite blog, might remember 2023’s Monolith, a movie that also featured a very very small cast (just the lead on screen in that case, two people here), a spooky podcast and a lot of emphasis on sound design. The similarities end there, but the end result is also a really spooky movie. A very slow burn, with long panning shots that let your imagination wander in the negative space in the frame, then things go south and it gets pretty bonkers. Nice!

A simple way to improve it: I liked how subtly they played with “is there something in the background, or?” until they stopped being subtle. That said, I would want even more “wait, am I seeing a thing there, or…?” stuff, yup.

Trivia about the IMDb trivia:

There is no archaeological evidence of humans being immured into the foundations of the medieval London Bridge.

I like how without any other context this manages to A) sound extremely ominous and B) make me think there definitely are some corpses down there.