Sundance film festival: there are some effective early moments in this ultra low-budget, audio-first horror but deja vu soon replaces intrigue

There’s a swirl of creepy noises in A24’s new hyped-up horror Undertone – screaming, gargling, singing, banging – but nothing is quite loud enough to drown out the swirl of films it’s cribbing from. The debut feature from writer-director Ian Tuason, about horror podcasters who receive a set of mysterious recordings, has elements of Paranormal Activity, Session 9, Hereditary, The Ring, The Blair Witch Project and The Exorcist, enough sighs of familiarity to give horror fans a scary case of deja vu. It’s not that total originality is expected at this particular moment (this weekend’s Send Help has been touted as Misery meets Castaway), but given the genre’s overcrowd, it’s hard to see what pushes Undertone above the noise.

What it does do is make for an impressively resourceful use of a low budget, the whole thing costing about $500,000. It’s all shot in one house (Tuason’s actual home) and for the most part, any sinister goings on are restricted to audio footage, heard through the headphones of our lead Eva (Nina Kiri, who reminds me of a young Alice Eve). She’s living back home with her terminally ill mother, fending calls from a thoughtless boyfriend and patiently awaiting those from her friend, and maybe one that got away, Justin (the voice of White Lotus breakout Adam DiMarco, replacing the original voice after the A24 acquisition). The pair co-host a podcast that analyses creepy tales, Eva as the skeptic and Justin as the believer, the pair’s flirtatious pitter-patter positioning them as the Mulder and Scully of the audio world.

Au lendemain de l'annonce des nominations des César 2026 et à un peu moins d'un mois de la cérémonie (qui a été avancée de 24h, le jeudi 26 février précisément), la promo décalée commence autour de son maitre de cérémonie, Benjamin Lavernhe.

Avec le réalisateur Hugo Gélin (French Lover, Mon…

Article original publié sur AlloCiné

Sundance film festival: comedian Iliza Shlesinger’s nonsensical misfire is a swirl of cliches, unfunny comedy, stock characters and bizarre direction from Josephine Decker

I will give Chasing Summer this: there’s something inherently interesting about its unexpected union of two opposite forces. On one side there’s Josephine Decker, an unusual film-maker whose genre-challenging work spans experimental theater (2019’s Madeline’s Madeline), claustrophobic psychodrama (2020’s perversely thrilling, woefully underseen Shirley) and magical realism (the 2022 YA grief flick The Sky Is Everywhere). On the other, comedian Iliza Shlesinger, whose brand of fast-paced, ribald, sometimes hilarious (and sometimes too gender-essentialist) standup is both subverted and enhanced by her own white, blond conventional attractiveness. I can’t imagine many saw the former choosing to direct Chasing Summer, a Hallmark-esque comedy written by and starring the latter. Theoretically, the collision should generate sparks.

It does, though I can’t imagine in the way the odd couple intended. The 98-minute film, which premiered this week at Sundance, is one of the most bizarre combinations of director and material I’ve ever seen, more curious car crash than collaboration. It is almost worth it to watch a sensitive and surprising director, so attuned to inner turmoil and unreality, wrangle anything substantial out of razor-thin characters and a boilerplate set-up.

Chasing Summer is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution