As he cared for his dying parents, Ian Tuason wrote horror film ‘Undertone’

Six years ago, when filmmaker Ian Tuason‘s parents were both diagnosed with terminal cancer, the writer-director moved back into the suburban Toronto home where he’d been raised to be their caregiver.

His mother died quickly, his father two years later. It was a time of trauma and grief but throughout it all Tuason worked, writing a screenplay for “Undertone,” the new A24 horror film that which arrives in theaters on Friday, March 13.

“When I was caregiving, I was really stressed out,” Tuason says on a recent video call with Nina Kiri and Adam DiMarco, who play Evy and Justin, cohosts of the urban legend podcast that gives the film its name.

“I kind of wanted to leave,” he continues. “Started feeling guilty for feeling like I wanted it to be over. The thoughts. You’d never think you’d wish death upon anyone you love, but then it’s a weird situation when it feels like it would be better for everybody.”

For the two-and-a-half years he took care of his dying parents, Tuason worked on the “Undertone” screenplay, transforming his real-life days and nights into a fictional story of supernatural horror.

Evy is alone in her childhood home tending to her dying mother played by Michèle Duquet. In the early hours after midnight, she and her cohost Justin meet online to record episodes of the Undertone podcast.

An anonymous email delivers 10 sound files and the prospect of a spooky tale to explore – Evy as the skeptic, Justin the true believer. But as they work through the files, Evy’s perspective shifts as eerie sounds and unexplainable experiences pierce the veil between her rational world and something much darker.

The sound design both in the audio files and in the house – Tuason’s actual family home – is supremely creepy.

Kiri, whose credits include a recurring role on “The Handmaid’s Tale,” shines as almost the only actor on screen. Duquet is almost completely comatose and DiMarco, known for “The White Lotus” and “Overcompensating,” is not seen at all.

“That was pretty much me up there on the screen,” Tuason says. “Evy was me and I was kind of in denial that something was wrong, that I did need help. I was experiencing caregiver burnout. Started drinking and started lying about it.

“You start lying enough that you start mistrusting the reality around you,” he says. “That’s what the undertones are metaphors for.”

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Tuason, Kiri and DiMarco talk about the unique quality of the production from shooting inside the director’s childhood home to never appearing on screen together and more.

Q: When you first read the screenplay, what were your initial reactions?

NINA KIRI: The feeling when I first read it was just like the walls closing in. The claustrophobia of only one person, only one house. Then, as she goes through what she’s going through and falls deeper and deeper, you have no choice but to fall with her.

While I was reading it, I felt like that. I really liked that aspect of it because it’s one of my favorite ways of building tension. There’s no gimmick to that type of tension. It’s just a purely terrifying feeling of being in this situation and not being able to get out as worse and worse things happen. So I was really, really impressed with that.

ADAM DiMARCO: Yeah, the script was such a fresh, novel take on horror. I’m always listening to something throughout my day. I always have headphones and I’m listening to music or a podcast. So that kind of auditory element really excited me just as an audience member reading the screenplay for the first time.

I couldn’t wait to actually hear how the audio recordings would sound when we got to set. Then just meeting with Ian and Nina and all the great Canadian cast and crew, that was really appealing to me as well.

And just the challenge of a new kind of performance for me. Something that is just purely voice, and getting to play and explore in that world was really something I wanted to be a part of in whatever way.

Q: Did you feel any extra pressure, Nina, knowing that you were the only person other than Mama we see on screen in this?

KIRI: Yeah, I felt the pressure of making sure that, because it’s all falling on me, it better be specific to the character that Ian wrote. Then that pressure manifested itself and I better knew exactly who this person is from my perspective. It’s like I know it’s based on Ian’s story, but the real pressure I felt was how do I make this specific and bring what I can to it.

Once I figured that out, the pressure went away. I didn’t actually [know until] I watched it, like, ‘Oh wow, so much of this is my face up close.’ But I didn’t know that at the time. If I had known that maybe the pressure would be more.

Q: We never see you, Adam. Were you off-screen in the same room as Nina? Someplace else entirely?

DiMARCO: They had set me up on the top floor in Ian’s adolescent bedroom. You were using Ian’s childhood bedroom as your green room –

KIRI: – And I was downstairs in the living room [for the podcasting scenes].

DiMARCO: So it was really cool being able to actually be on location. I could see Nina, but she couldn’t see me, which was kind of a fun thing to play with. I wasn’t really watching too much, though. I was pretending I was on a podcast. They had me set up with mics and laptops, and it really did feel real.

I would use the room. I’d stand up. I’d start a scene by sitting in the chair, just trying to make it feel natural, any other acting scene, I guess.

Q: Ian, tell me about the decision to use your family home to shoot the film in.

TUASON: My house was like a co-director of the film. As I was writing, I was also storyboarding, so I was taking photos of every shot. If you look at the storyboards, it’s pretty much identical to what you see in the movie. So I had to shoot it there. Also, I couldn’t afford to shoot anywhere else.

Then, by the time we were ready to shoot, I kind of went through so much that I wasn’t really afraid of anything. It didn’t feel weird. It felt … what did it feel like?

KIRI: Did it feel cathartic?

TUASON: It felt cathartic at certain points when I was watching you perform because you were expressing stuff that I was feeling. But it was comfortable. I mean, I grew up there. I went through so many different phases of my life there. So there were different chapters and that was just one of the chapters.

Q: I have to ask you about the sound design because it’s almost like the other main character here.

TUASON: Well, the audio [file] recordings were done on an iPhone in the house with blocking and an actor holding the iPhone. So that gave it the genuine found footage-type feel. The rest of the sounds, not including the location sounds, which were just Nina’s footsteps and all that, were created in studio. Shout out to RedLab.

We mixed those sound effects in Dolby Atmos, so I had so many channels and so many different directions to place certain sounds, like a baby crying or a loud bang. The intention was to create a 3D soundscape, almost like a haunted house in an amusement park. Like I’m taking you through this amusement park ride.

That’s why it’s important to watch it in the movie theater, because you go on rides with your friends and you hear them scream and that makes you happy, right?

KIRI: It’s an experience.

TUASON: Yeah.

Q: Nina, tell me about working with Michèle as a Mama, who conveys a lot while barely moving at all.

KIRI: Yeah, it’s interesting you say that because I didn’t expect – like when you’re saying she’s there, I didn’t know what I expected from her. I think we all didn’t know what to expect. We’re just thinking, “Oh, you know, she’s mostly lying down. She’s not doing much.” But she did a thousand times more than anybody expected in the sense that she was so intimately familiar with the stages her character was going through.

Just from her own breathing technique to the position of her mouth. It was so realistic, and the amount of energy coming out of her for her to just be lying there was pretty extraordinary. And then for that iconic part that’s in the trailer, where Mama gets up as I turn around?

She’s just super-ripped because she’s a rock climber. She can move her body in the most specific ways, where to me it looked like, I don’t know, CGI or something.

Q: So that’s just her, sitting up like something is controlling her?

KIRI: Doing a sit-up, honestly, like vertebrae by vertebrae.

TUASON: Without having anyone hold down your legs.

KIRI: Yeah, no one was holding down her legs.

Q: I wouldn’t have guessed that and could never do that.

KIRI: Yeah, me neither.

Q: Adam, and Nina, too, tell me about the first time you heard the creepy audio clips.

DiMARCO: Nina and I approached it in a similar way, where we wanted to hear them live [on camera] for the first time. Something about those recordings, and how Ian filmed them, every time kind of felt like the first time I was hearing them.

It really forces you into a state of curiosity and presence. Even if it was a second take, third take, maybe I can hear something I didn’t pick up on before. They were designed so well that it was just a joy to act alongside them.

KIRI: They’re so realistic, the first time you hear them you don’t even have to act. It’s just a reaction to how specific they are and how scary they are and how close to home they feel.