Throughout my ever-growing experience with the Dolby Atmos theatrical enhancements, I’ve become less and less enamored with the hype. At the tail end of the barrage of trailers, usually the moment I finally let out a sigh of relief, because I actually get to watch what I paid for, there’s another ad by Dolby touting itself as “the most immersive sound experience.” That might be true in their ideal testing environment, where every setting has been properly calibrated, and every pair of ears is finely tuned. But in the modern multiplex, where quality control is increasingly falling down a slippery slope, I’ve come to think of Atmos as an excuse for the theater to crank the sound up to 200%, claiming that louder is better. We all know that isn’t true, as that would mean Michael Bay would be perpetually atop the Sight and Sound polls.

In the case of Undertone, neither louder nor quieter is better. The moments of loud noise split my ears, eliciting irritation rather than intimidation. And the (many) moments of silence nearly put me to sleep, a symptom of a been-there-done-that story infused with every modern elevated horror trope in the book. Somewhere between those large gulfs are a few tiny oases of craft and intrigue, just enough to make you have hope that this very flawed film would miraculously morph into something that was at least decently commendable.

Undertone is all about the sounds that surround us, as well as the silence, which we should probably be more afraid of. We get that in the opening cue: the raspy breathing of a dying woman, all signs of a recovery fully absent. She is the mother of Evy (Nina Kiri, potentially a long-lost relative of Jenna Ortega), who has been living in her mother’s home to provide around-the-clock care in her final days. The mother was very religious, always saying prayers for the agnostic Evy. Based on those few sentences, I’m pretty sure you can predict all the spooky things that are going to happen next.

Evy’s only connection to the mortal world is the paranormal podcast she hosts with her friend Justin, voiced by Adam DiMarco. She’s the skeptic, and he’s the believer. They receive a cryptic email of ten audio recordings, each progressively tracking the strangely creepy circumstances of a couple who begin hearing loud noises in their apartment. The explainable slowly turns into the unexplainable, with Evy’s circumstances at home seemingly being morphed by what’s happening in the recordings.

First-time feature writer/director Ian Tuason shows more promise as a director rather than a writer. His script is scattered with the dime-a-dozen elements of grief, childhood traumas, motherhood, and religious guilt. What’s even scarier is the fact that a doctor makes a routine health call at 3:00 AM, and that Evy and Justin record their seemingly popular podcast in ten-minute chunks and fill it with some of the most inauthentic banter I’ve ever heard. DiMarco’s voice work is entirely too trained; every sigh, inflection, and pause is the result of overcalibration.

Tuason’s camera is static throughout most of the film. Evy is usually on the side of the frame, the negative space being enveloped by a black void that could house any of our deepest fears. The editing is fairly routine, with close-ups and wide shots interplaced at the exact moments we’re expecting. The flourishes near the end may feel like they come from a film student thinking that they’ve somehow revolutionized the art, but they at least provide some semblance of a pulse.

By that endpoint, I’d come to realize that I’d sat through eighty-five minutes of nothingness (plus twenty minutes of trailers for some of the most bottom-of-the-barrel new horror releases) for five minutes of something that kind of interested me. That’s not exactly a beneficial trade-off. And yet, it’s one that I feel like I’m being forced to make more and more in these post-Hereditary days, where filmmakers delude themselves into thinking that a grab bag of therapy buzzwords makes their genre picture into high art.