Undertone Review: A24 Built a Horror Film Out of the Fears Filipinos Grew Up With

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This is Ian Tuason’s first feature and he both wrote & directed it. He is Fil-Canadian, based in Toronto, and raised Catholic in a Filipino household. He came to features from virtual reality, making live-action 360 horror shorts that pulled more than 14 million views and played South by Southwest (SXSW), Fantasia, and Cannes. He first went to the Philippines at 14 and heard all the Aswang stories there, which tracks with what ends up on screen. The haunted Virgin Mary figurine is his, inspired by the Santo Niño dolls that scared him as a kid.

It was genuinely creepy and it really built the atmosphere. It seemed to hold a lot of Filipino scary tropes, the ones you traded with friends in grade school or high school. Witching hour at 3 a.m. Your reflection in the mirror finishing the prayer you were reciting. There was also a lot of religious iconography, which I think is inherently scary for Filipinos.

He made it for $500,000. It premiered at Fantasia in July 2025, six buyers went after it, and A24 won in the mid-seven figures. So he was paid several times what the film cost before it even opened, and it has since taken $21.5 million worldwide.

There was a lot of good setup, and it felt creepy several times. I wanted to look behind me in the room because it touched on some inherent fears.

The parts work on their own. Children are creepy. Reverse audio is creepy and inviting. A demon is scary, and so is repetition. The voice of the demon, though, is kind of funny. Put all of it together and it turns into a mishmash: the targeting, the callers being tricked, the stuff on the ceiling at the end. I don’t know what I am supposed to be scared of. Ghosts? A monster? A spirit? Something religious? A demon? Different realities? Those are all different things.

When I watch The Backrooms, I get it. The rules are clear. The space around you is wrong, and wrong space is the entire point, so chairs on the ceiling belong there. Undertone never sets rules like that. It would have worked better closer to The Ring (2002), where the threat is something you can see and understand, and understanding it doesn’t save you.

My partner, who is more of a cinephile than me, insists all of that is the point. She says it is intentional that you are made afraid of something that isn’t there, and that the film is playing with negative space. The term for it is audio pareidolia. It works the way a backwards record does: people only hear the words once they already know what to listen for. There is really nothing there. You putting something where there is nothing is what makes it scary.

She sees another layer under that, and it is guilt. Evy’s guilt about abandoning her mom, and the inherent Catholic guilt sitting beneath that. There also seemed to be a scene where she calls a clinic for a schedule, which implies she wanted to get rid of the baby, and she tells her mom outright that she isn’t sure she would be a good mom. Both feed the same thing. That might be the real core of the movie if you want to put meaning behind it, and my partner does that so well.

I get it. I still wanted to see the thing.

Not bad at all for a first try, and genuinely impressive for the money. A little more meat at the end would have gotten them there.

★★★☆☆.

Find me on Letterboxd if you want to see what else I have been watching.