Communication devices have long been taken over by unwelcome entities in scary movies. Maybe it was the bedevilled TVs in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) that started it. It’s not so much that we believe our phones and gadgets and media might actually be haunted – more that we hate them so much that we want them to be.
We’re still waiting for the first great haunted-chatbot movie, but in the meantime this tidy Canadian chiller offers a bit of a throwback, courtesy of a possessed podcast. A woman called Evy (Nina Kiri) is staying in her mother’s dowdy antique home to nurse this comatose mama (Michèle Duquet) through her final, death-rattling days. Evy’s role in life is co-hosting a gleeful online show called The Undertone, “where we talk about all things creepy”. The other host, Justin (Adam DiMarco), lives in London, which for some reason means the thing has to be recorded in Evy’s middle of the night.
The whole movie takes place in the mother’s house, so Evy and the spark-out mother are the only actors we see: everything else is off-screen voice work. Justin has been emailed a series of worrying recordings made by a young couple, whose whereabouts are unknown. The sound files are of the woman babbling out nursery rhymes and guttural nonsense in her sleep, and of the couple freaking out when she wakes up. And, of course, spectres from this sonic chaos will blow back through the ether and the internet into Evy’s moon-blighted mansion as Evy and Justin bung it, bit by bit, into their podcast.
Digging into things, they discover demonic messages in songs played backwards, myths about sacrificed orphans under London Bridge, and stories of infants drowned in kitchen sinks – while we get a whole kitchen sink of spooky tropes in Evy’s environs. The film’s writer-director, Ian Tuason, surrounds her with every imaginable “Foley” effect – creaking, rustling, muffled thumping, water spurting – plus lights a-flicker, canted camera angles, dark and empty (we think) stairwells, melting religious figurines, and crazy scrawlings that look like the notes of a film critic in the dark.
There’s a “mirror scare” we sense is about to happen – but then the scare happens in a corner beyond the angle of the bedroom mirror. So we think the director’s too grown-up for mirror scares. Then he does a good one when we don’t expect it.
Tuason’s approach is fairly measured and meticulous – more in common with the honed precision of Kubrick in The Shining than, say, the dirty mayhem of Brian De Palma in Carrie. (The former may not carry the same punch as it once did; the latter may speak more to our times.) Even when things go bananas at the end of a slow-slow-quick 90 minutes, a decorous feel persists, along with an absence of clarity as to the story outcome. Evy’s lack of spiritual support for her devout Catholic mum seems to have something to do with it.
Nina Kiri anchors the movie well, and the surrounding voice work is so good you feel the presence of fully fleshed-out supports. But whether Evy is being groomed as an innocent sacrificial victim or she’s a careless cynic who deserves a reckoning is left as a bit of a toss-up.
As usual with these kinds of efforts, you might go home afterwards a little nervous about entering an empty dwelling at night. Or even about putting your phone on again after the movie. In fact, if you’d left it on, its trills and beeps might only have augmented the frantically busy 3-D soundscape of the film. The surround sound was so good in my screening, I couldn’t tell if various whisperings were from the audience or the movie. Wait, though… what if they were neither?
