There’s something inherently invasive about horror that travels through headphones—sound that bypasses the room and goes straight into your skull. That’s the pressure point A24 leans into with the official trailer for “undertone,” Ian Tuason’s feature debut (and an established sci-fi author) that weaponizes the intimacy of listening: a popular paranormal podcast host starts receiving terrifying recordings from an anonymous source, and they don’t stay contained to the show.
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The setup is elegantly nasty. Per the film’s logline, the host of a hit spooky podcast becomes haunted by the mysterious audio files sent her way—recordings that escalate into something genuinely threatening. And in Fantasia’s more detailed description of the premise, the story centers on Evy, a skeptic co-hosting a paranormal podcast while caring for her dying mother, when an email delivers a batch of unsettling files that begin to bleed into her already-fragile reality.
Nina Kiri (The Handmaid’s Tale, per Fantasia) leads the film, alongside Adam DiMarco, Michèle Duquet, Keana Lyn Bastidas, and Jeff Yung. The feature is written and directed by Tuason, with Dan Slater and Cody Calahan producing.
“undertone” premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival in July 2025, where it also took the Gold Audience Award for Best Canadian Feature—exactly the kind of genre-crowd co-sign that tends to travel when a movie’s doing something sharp with atmosphere and craft.
The film opens in theaters on March 13, 2026. Watch the new trailer below
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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