Undertone (2026): Anticipatory Anxiety, and the Psychology of Being Haunted by Someone Else’s Story

Ian Tuason’s feature debut uses an auditory architecture that’s both the film’s greatest strength and its most limiting constraint, creating something psychologically interesting about how people can become trapped inside narratives that were never actually theirs. Evy is a woman living with her dying mother, hosting a paranormal podcast with her invisible cohost Justin, performing skepticism about supernatural occurrences while simultaneously living with mortality in its most concrete form. When mysterious audio files arrive from an anonymous sender (recordings of a couple experiencing strange sounds in their home), Evy begins listening obsessively, and the film tracks what happens when she projects her own psychological crisis onto someone else’s documented experience.

The psychological mechanism at work in Undertone revolves around a particular kind of vulnerability: Evy is watching her mother die. She’s carrying the weight of caregiving, of impending loss, of the recognition that the person who shaped her is becoming unreachable. When Jessa’s voice arrives through the speakers, when Jessa’s documented paranoia about her own home mirrors Evy’s documented paranoia about her mother’s mortality, Evy finds herself drawn into Jessa’s story not because the story is inherently threatening, but because Jessa’s story provides a container for Evy’s own unprocessed terror.

The Psychology of Auditory Experience and Vulnerability

What Tuason understands is that sound operates differently from visual information in how it penetrates human psychology. You can look away from something terrifying. You cannot unhear something that’s already entered your auditory space. The film leverages this by forcing Evy, and therefore the viewer, to listen to recordings that become increasingly unsettling, and to listen without being able to verify what’s actually happening. Is Jessa really hearing “Mike, kill all” in her own backwards singing? Or is she hearing what she’s been primed to expect to hear?

This is the actual psychological architecture of pareidolia and auditory hallucination, the ways that human brains impose patterns and meaning on random stimuli. Evy is a skeptic intellectually, which means she should understand this. But she’s a person in psychological crisis, which means her skepticism becomes compromised. When you’re anxious, when you’re grieving, when you’re living in a state of prolonged stress, your capacity to distinguish between genuine threat and projected threat deteriorates. The sounds Jessa hears become scarier to Evy, not because they’re objectively threatening, but because Evy is desperate for an explanation for the dread she’s experiencing.

The Mechanism of Narrative Capture

The film’s central psychological insight concerns how compelling narratives can override accurate perception. Evy receives these recordings. Justin becomes obsessed with them. Together, they begin constructing a narrative about what’s happening: a demon named Abyzou, a creature that targets pregnant women and mothers, specifically designed to align with Evy’s deepest fears about motherhood and loss. The more the narrative develops, the more Evy becomes trapped inside it, unable to step back and recognize that she’s been building a story rather than discovering one.

Justin functions as the psychological amplifier in this dynamic. He believes completely. His belief gives weight to the narrative. When someone you trust and respect becomes deeply invested in a particular interpretation of reality, it becomes psychologically difficult to maintain a different interpretation, even if that different interpretation is more accurate. Evy is influenced by Justin’s certainty, which means she’s influenced away from her own skepticism and toward his credulity. She’s being shaped by her relationship with him in ways she doesn’t fully recognize.

The reveal that Evy is pregnant herself functions as the narrative turning point that makes the projection complete. Evy is not simply listening to Jessa’s story anymore. She’s becoming Jessa. She’s recognizing her own deepest fears being articulated through Jessa’s voice, and that recognition becomes psychologically overwhelming. Evy begins experiencing her own apartment as haunted, not because the apartment has changed, but because her interpretation of the apartment has changed.

Where the Psychological Framework Strains Under Minimalist Structure

The film’s greatest weakness is that its minimalist approach (single location, primarily auditory horror, minimal visible action) becomes increasingly limiting as the narrative progresses. The psychological insights about how projection and anxiety shape perception are sophisticated, but the film doesn’t have visual or behavioral tools to deepen those insights. Instead, it relies heavily on the sound design to carry the psychological weight, which it does effectively for the first half of the film, but which becomes repetitive and less effective as it continues.

Additionally, the film leaves certain psychological questions fundamentally unresolved. Is Evy actually experiencing paranormal phenomena, or is she experiencing a psychological breakdown triggered by grief, pregnancy anxiety, and sleep deprivation? The film seems to want to suggest both simultaneously, which is interesting thematically but less effective narratively. The ambiguity works well when the film is operating as a study of how anxiety distorts perception. It works less well when the film seems to be trying to convince you that the paranormal elements might actually be real.

The ending, which operates as a shift toward genuine horror rather than psychological horror, somewhat undercuts the film’s actual strength, which is psychological rather than supernatural. The moment the film has to commit to whether the events are real or not, it loses the nuance that made it compelling in the first place.

The Cost of Listening

“Undertone” is a recognition of how vulnerable we all are to being shaped by compelling narratives, especially when we’re in psychological distress. Evy wasn’t looking for a haunting. She was looking for an explanation for the terror she was already experiencing. Jessa’s recordings provided that explanation. The fact that the explanation was probably incorrect doesn’t make it psychologically less powerful.

Tuason has created something genuinely interesting about how external narratives can colonize internal space, how listening to someone else’s fear can trigger your own fear, and how difficult it becomes to distinguish between the fear you brought into an experience and the fear the experience has created. The film’s auditory minimalism works as both its greatest asset and its primary limitation, creating an experience that’s psychologically sophisticated but structurally constrained.