Review Category: Movie

Undertone immediately made waves following its premiere at Fantasia International Film Festival in 2025, quickly lauded as one of the scariest films of the fest and a must-see as soon as genre fans could get their eyes – and ears – on it. Ian Tuason’s hotly-tipped feature debut soon made its way to Sundance and was picked up by A24, further adding to its buzz. Now enjoying its theatrical run, Undertone is a nerve-shredding auditory experience that will bore into your brain and haunt you long after the credits roll.

The single-location horror film focuses on Evy (Nina Kiri), a woman who hosts the Undertone podcast with her friend Justin (Adam DiMarco), in which she is the sceptic to his believer. She records the episodes from her childhood home, where she has moved to act as caregiver to her dying mother (Michèle Duquet). The duo is sent recordings of a married couple (Keana Lyn Bastidas and Jeff Yung) experiencing terrifying noises and phenomena in their home, listening and reacting while they record. While reviewing mysterious audio files, Evy begins to notice terrifying parallels within her own life.

Undertone’s hook lies in its simplicity, with one character in one location listening to recordings and experiencing increasingly eerie phenomena, from bumps in the night to creaking doors. It’s a classic haunted house tale with a thoroughly modern twist, as ghosts in the wires break into the real world and threaten to take the most vulnerable in society. The narrative does become somewhat convoluted in the threads it attempts to juggle, but when it strips everything back and focuses on its blood-chilling scares, Undertone lives up to its marketing promise of being “the scariest film you’ll ever hear”. Tuason expertly builds tension from start to finish, never giving the viewer chance to relax as it hurtles towards its nerve-shredding final act. Every detail littered through the narrative is pulled together in a satisfying conclusion, layering fright upon fright to almost unbearable effect. While Undertone sometimes wanders off beat, it is a testament to the power of storytelling, frightening you long after viewing.

The use of sound fully immerses the viewer into the horror, with Tuason creating an auditory hellscape that puts you right into the shoes of the podcast hosts. Undertone works perfectly both in a state-of-the-art cinema and streamed at home through headphones – in the dark, of course – offering a fresh, yet still terrifying experience each time. Kiri carries much of the chaos of Undertone in her incredible performance, commanding the screen at all times as she grapples with the impending death of her mother, learning she is pregnant, and the supernatural horrors unfolding in front of her. She brings to life the burnt-out podcast host escaping into the world of ghosts and ghouls to shut out the trauma of her own life without relying on familiar tropes horror fans will have seen time and time again, compounding the events she is living out before our eyes.

Undertone is a nightmarish descent into madness and an impressive feat of storytelling. Despite being rough around the edges in parts, Tuason’s feature debut ramps up the terror with the simplest of frights, thanks to his expert grip on the central demon’s lore and the story unravelling in the recordings. Undertone is at its best when it goes back to basics, creating some of 2026’s most terrifying sequences with some of the most simplistic set pieces, noises, and reactions from Evy. It shifts and changes with each disturbing revelation, with varying success, in a unique way that is sure to usher in a slew of imitations.

UNDERTONE is in cinemas now. You can read our interview with Ian Tuason and Nina Kiri here.

Not content with tearing one family apart in Evil Dead Rise, director Lee Cronin returns to torment another with his take on a classic movie monster. Forget Brendan Fraser and Boris Karloff – this ain’t your mother’s Mummy. In its tale of a tight-knit family unit ripped to pieces by the disappearance and sudden return of their beloved daughter, Cronin goes hard. Harder, even, than his previous film. Which is no mean feat – we’re still cringing at the memory of what he put the characters of Evil Dead Rise through.

Thrown into a fresh cycle of trauma is the Cannon family, led by TV journalist Charlie (Midsommar star Jack Reynor) and pregnant wife Larissa (Laia Costa). They’re living in Cairo when their young daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) is suddenly kidnapped by a creeper at the bottom of the garden. Eight years later, and now residing in New Mexico, Charlie and Larissa are shocked when Katie is found. With her now catatonic after spending the best part of a decade locked inside a sarcophagus, it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t the same Katie they lost. Quite literally, in fact, as she’s now played by Natalie Grace in a performance that’s part Hereditary, part The Exorcism.

And what happened to Katie? As the family try to reintegrate the teenager into the home, Charlie puts his skills as a journalist to good use in unlocking the mystery of her disappearance. What he soon comes to learn is that… well, maybe Katie should have stayed buried.

Where the efficiently horrible Evil Dead Rise barely pushed ninety minutes, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy takes its time to breathe… a rank, fetid breath that reeks of death and embalming fluid. Written by the director in the wake of real-life tragedy, it holds nothing back in its depiction of grief and its devastating effects on those of us who survive. It’s sphincter-tightening, sick-in-your-mouth stuff, and includes a sequence which does for toenail clippers what Evil Dead Rise did for the cheese grater.  This is made all the more discomforting for its likeable cast (including Billie Roy and Shylo Molina, who play the Cannons’ other children) and the well-written, often heartbreaking family dynamic.

It may come off the rails during the boisterous final act (including an egregiously tacked-on closing scene), but this is the most fun you’ll have with a bad time this year. Provided you don’t go in expecting a traditional Mummy movie from Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, that is. Blending intense body horror with big scares and even bigger laughs, the director more than earns his name being in the title. His bloody fingerprints are all over the thing – a crowd-pleasing, stomach-upsetting work of sustained horror that’s more Evil Dead than his actual Evil Dead film.

LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY is out in UK cinemas now.

Waking up on a mysterious spaceship, school teacher and passionate biologist Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) has to rely on his fractured memory to piece back together not only how he got there, but why he is there. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse), and adapted for cinema by Drew Goddard (The Martian) from the Andy Weir novel of the same name, Project Hail Mary instantly pulls the viewer into its intriguing enigma, and what follows is one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made.

Known for his outstanding earlier novels The Martian and Artemis (also soon to be adapted by Lord and Miller), renowned sci-fi author Andy Weir constructed a stunning sci-fi world with Project Hail Mary, which could have only been a dream to translate to the big screen. Just like with Ridley Scott’s take on The Martian, Weir’s grounded use of science within his storytelling shines through wonderfully. It makes for a compelling watch as you attempt to figure out each urgent situation alongside the protagonist.

During Ryland’s flashbacks, we discover that single-celled spaceborne organisms named Astrophage are draining the energy from the Sun, setting Earth on a course to catastrophe, and doing the same to all nearby stars – except for a distant star called Tau Ceti, which has somehow not been affected. The government-appointed agent Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) assembles the finest team of astronauts and scientists the world has to offer, and sends them on a one-way deep space mission to Tau Ceti to find out how they can fix our sun. Due to his history with molecular biology, Eva recruits Ryland to find out a possible way of combatting Astrophage. But Ryland’s no astronaut, so how did he end up on the Hail Mary himself?

Backed by a stunning and commanding soundtrack from Daniel Pemberton (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse), alongside beautiful cinematography from Greig Fraser (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Dune, The Batman), the creative energy and passion from everyone involved is on display through every single frame. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller also used no green or blue screens, which not only makes you appreciate the movie even more, grounding the story within a believable setting.

If you’ve seen any trailer for Project Hail Mary, then you’ve probably witnessed an alien character called Rocky. Voiced by puppeteer James Ortiz, the dynamic between Grace and Rocky has already become iconic. The pair share fascinating moments of humour, joy, and complete fear, as they team up to save both their species. It’s quite simply, “Amaze. Amaze. Amaze.”

In its later act, we see huge, beautiful, sweeping sci-fi sequences that have you mesmerised, which eventually leads to – just like the book – a satisfying ending. With what comes across as three huge narrative sections that differ rewardingly from each other, and an ending that ties everything neatly together, the storytelling pace of Project Hail Mary is flawless. It’s a perfect balance.

Thanks to movies like Interstellar, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and Dune, sci-fi has found success with a more serious tone in recent years, but Project Hail Mary is something for everyone. It’s almost Spielberg-esque in its approach. Capturing the monumental tone of the book in a grand scale that you could not be prepared for, it is sci-fi at its absolute best.

Avant-garde artists Jasper (Rowan Polonski) and Harriet (Abigail Hardingham) embark on a collaboration selling custom kinky video clips to people. One day, Jasper is offered 10K for some specific scenes. There are some snags: the footage must be shot on a specific vintage video camera, and they must not watch the tapes themselves. Jasper is troubled, however, when he has no recollection of what they did on camera for the mysterious punter, and he’s too tempted to resist looking at what’s been recorded. As things progress, each video takes its toll on the pair.

Written and directed by Tiago Teixeira, Custom delves into a murky, ritualistic world that wouldn’t be out of place in a David Cronenberg movie. Being full of familiar genre references, it messes with the audiences’ heads as much as it does with the characters on screen. The oppressive sound design envelops everything and is as important as any dialogue, particularly towards the conclusion. Polonski and Hardingham are impressive in their roles, albeit playing fairly unlikable characters. Their descent into psychotropic madness is handled well and offers a few surprises along the way.

Trying to be enigmatic, Teixeira fills the screen with haunting, Lynchian visuals, including one sequence that almost fetishises videotape itself. Custom almost achieves the status of being the British equivalent of Videodrome with its depiction of nightmarish scenarios. It can be heavy going, though.

CUSTOM is available on digital platforms.

When the original Faces of Death came out in 1978, the world was convinced that this shockumentary was real, when in reality it was predominantly fake. Today, we live in a world where social media algorithms consume our lives, AI is readily available, and everyone is trying to be the main attraction. Though not a direct remake of the infamous shockumentary, Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei‘s reboot follows a social media moderator (Euphoria’s Barbie Ferreira) who comes across a group re-enacting the original film’s murders. It explores where the film stands today with regard to new technology, the growing attention economy we live in, and who we are in this bizarre world of social media sensationalism.

Faces of Death 2026 is crazy from start to finish. As humans living in the modern day, we’re constantly in search of the next shocking, viral thing. Here, as our current lives are on display, with the majority of the world being desensitised and content creation being the premier career, it poses the question of what can be deemed as entertainment, and do we dare give the people what they want? Ferreira gives us a stunning performance, which could land her the title of scream queen in the future, and Dacre Montgomery gets under your skin and truly unnerves you the moment he’s on screen.

This is unlike anything you’re expecting. It can be argued that the original was the first ever viral video, as it gave us an insight into how evil and sick humanity could be; the new film simply solidifies that we are still just as bad, if not worse. As a society we love a remake, and the algorithm is no different, so why not capitalise and put our morbid interests back in the spotlight – but will you watch on, or will you look away?

FACES OF DEATH is out now in the US.