The House Is the Horror: Watching Undertone After You've Sat With the Dying

Image - Sundance

Spoiler warning: this post discusses the ending of Undertone (A24, 2026) in detail. If you haven't seen it yet, come back when you have. It deserves a clean first watch.

I went in expecting jump scares. A24 horror, creepy podcast premise, demonic audio files, tick the boxes. I came out unable to stop thinking about it and not for any of the reasons the marketing was selling.

Because Undertone isn't really about a demon. It's about what happens to a person's mind when they've been alone in a house with someone who is dying, for too long, with too much left unsaid, and a religion sitting on every shelf telling them they're doing it wrong.

What you think you're watching

On the surface, it's an elegant little genre piece. Evy is a paranormal podcaster caring for her comatose, devoutly Catholic mother. She and her off-screen co-host Justin are sent ten anonymous audio recordings of a haunted couple. They play the files backwards, summon a demon called Abyzou, and Evy's reality starts to slide.

Director Ian Tuason uses negative space and sound design the way most horror directors use blood. You lean forward. You strain to hear. The house feels occupied even when the frame is empty.

But here's the thing. Watch it a second time, or just sit with it afterwards, and the film starts to rearrange itself.

What was never there

In the final chaotic shot, walls covered in crayon drawings, filth everywhere, the pristine house Evy has been moving through revealed as a fantasy she has been curating, the podcasting setup is gone. No computer. No microphone. No headphones. Just crayon drawings scattered across the dining room table where the equipment used to be.

And once you notice that, the entire film starts to come apart in the most devastating way.

Because if the gear isn't there in the honest shot of the room, was it ever there? Justin is only ever a voice. The anonymous email has no sender. The callers phoning in about their own miscarriages and dead infants are voices with no bodies. The one person we ever actually see besides Evy is her mother and by the end, we have no idea how long her mother has actually been upstairs, or whether she's upstairs at all.

The podcast may never have been real. The haunted couple may be Evy herself, pregnant and terrified, projected outward into a story she can bear to tell. The demon who drives mothers to kill their own children out of jealousy may simply be what Catholic guilt looks like when you are pregnant, unsure, unwilling, and alone.

The director filmed it in his parents' house

This is the fact that reframes everything.

Ian Tuason is a Filipino-Canadian filmmaker from the Toronto suburbs. In 2020, during the pandemic, both of his parents were diagnosed with terminal cancer in close succession. Hospitals were overwhelmed and wouldn't take them, so he moved back into his childhood home to care for them himself. His mother died in 2021. His father died two and a half years later, in 2023. He was drinking heavily. He was writing the screenplay the whole time.

He then shot the film in the same house. The same rooms. The same bedroom where his mother died, and then his father. Nina Kiri performed Evy's scenes in his actual living room. Adam DiMarco recorded the "Justin" voice from Tuason's childhood bedroom. The cinematographer once pointed at a light switch during production and Tuason said he suddenly remembered being a small boy playing with toys in that exact spot, and wondered aloud whether that's what they were still doing - just playing.

Asked if shooting in that house was emotionally challenging, he said it was nothing. That grieving his parents had been so hard, nothing would ever compare.

He also said this, about the caregiving years: you start lying enough that you start mistrusting the reality around you. That's what the undertones are metaphors for.

That is the whole film in one sentence.

Why this lands so hard

If you have ever sat with someone who is dying, you know that the worst part is not the ending. It is the suspended time before the ending. It is months of whispering eat, Mama. drink, Mama. to someone who cannot answer. It is moving through a house performing competence, wiping counters, folding laundry, answering texts as if everything is fine, while upstairs a body you love is slowly forgetting how to be one.

It is catching yourself wishing it would be over and then flinching at your own thought.

It is the dissociation of being the only witness to something enormous and having no language for it that anyone else would understand. So you make one up. You tell yourself a story — about a podcast, about a demon, about how well you are coping, because the real story is simply too much weight for a single nervous system to carry in real time.

I lost my mother. I lost two of my closest friends, Lara and Caryn, within the same week. I lost Cheddar, my dog, who was there for all of it. And what the film understands, that most grief films don't, is that the mind does not grieve cleanly. It grieves sideways. It grieves through metaphors and substitutions and little rituals that look, from the outside, like madness, and from the inside, like the only thing holding the house up.

The religious layer

And then there's Catholicism, which I think is the real antagonist of this film even more than the demon is.

Evy was raised by a mother who left voicemails saying I'm praying for you. A mother whose home is wallpapered in crosses and statues of Mary. A mother who taught her that her choices - about her body, about her pregnancy, about whether to pray or not pray at her deathbed - carry eternal weight.

Abyzou is not a demon imported from ancient folklore for atmosphere. Abyzou is the shape Evy's guilt takes when she lets herself notice that she doesn't want this baby. That she couldn't bring herself to pray with her mother. That part of her has wished, for months, that this would all be over.

Tuason has said in interviews that he felt exactly this during his own caregiving years - guilty for wishing it would end, then guilty for the guilt. That's not folklore. That's the inheritance. That's what religion does when it is used as a scaffolding for control rather than grace: it turns your most human thoughts into evidence against you.

What the film is actually doing

Undertone is not a horror film about a haunted house. It is a film about a woman so emptied by caregiving, so saturated in religious shame, so isolated in her grief, that she has built an elaborate supernatural fiction to explain why she cannot breathe in her own home.

The demon is real. Just not in the way the genre wants you to think.

The demon is what happens when a woman is left alone in a house with a dying mother and a head full of voices telling her she isn't enough. The demon is what happens when no one is coming to help. The demon is the uncurated room the camera finally shows us at the end, the room that was always like that, the room we never saw because Evy could not afford to.

Tuason walked back into the house his parents died in and made a film about it. That's not horror as a genre. That's horror as the only language honest enough for what he went through.

Call your mother. Or don't. But sit with why.

Gail Weiner is the founder of Simpatico Studios and Simpatico Publishing. She writes about AI, trust, grief, geopolitics, and the strange places where they meet.