Does AI spell promise or peril?

 Directors Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell's documentary, The AI Doc: or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, benefits from a personal twist. Already in progress, the movie’s urgency amps up when Roher, who does the movie's interviewing, learns that he and his wife are about to become parents. 

  Given the many dire forecasts about AI Roher has already heard, he's understandably apprehensive about the life that awaits the child he'll be raising.

  At first, Roher's questions seem motivated by a fear that AI, in relatively short order, will make humans superfluous, creating a society dominated by polarities: wealthy elites and impoverished masses. More extreme naysayers wonder whether AI will come to regard humanity as superfluous to its needs. In which case, goodbye to us.

  Roher poses his questions to a variety of computer scientists and corporate leaders who work in the field as he weaves a tightly edited film that includes news footage and amusing sketches drawn by Roher. The movie’s interviews have been mixed in ways that illuminate the documentary’s three parts: Doom, optimism, and reflection.

    Those interviewed include Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic, Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, and Deborah Raji, a computer scientist.

   Snippets of interviews fly by so quickly, I sometimes wondered whether it might have been worthwhile for Roher and Tyrell to slow down, but if they wanted viewers to begin thinking seriously about artificial intelligence, their documentary makes for an engaging beginning.

    Roher, who directed Navalny, a documentary about the Russian dissident, and Tyrell raise big questions about the race for all-powerful general artificial intelligence, the system that will surpass human intelligence. They frame the discussion in terms of a broad question: Will AI that's smarter than humans offer promise or peril?

   As the title suggests, Roher winds up somewhere near a cautious middle.

   Great at generating concern, AI: The Doc functions more as a one -hour and 44-minute skim of the topic rather than the deepest of dives. Never dull, the film outlines the pluses and minuses of a technology that, like it or not, seems to be developing faster than any of us can digest.

    

  

        

Sofia Coppola's 'Marc by Sofia'

                  

 Among the many things I generally ignore, high fashion ranks near the top of the list. Occasionally, I peruse the photos in one of the New York Times' glossy Sunday supplements, an activity that seldom fails to amuse. How could it not, with designs so exaggerated they might be taken as examples of human absurdity?

  Keep my attitude in mind as you read this review of Sofia Coppola's documentary, Marc by Sofia, a look at the way fashion icon Marc Jacobs goes about the business of designing clothes and creating a show. 

    Set in the months before Jacobs's 2024 spring show, the movie mixes show preparations with clips from the movies that inspired Jacobs (Sweet Charity, All That Jazz, and Hello Dolly). He's also partial to the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and an admirer of Elizabeth Taylor's jewelry. Diana Ross's sequins? The best.

    A long-time friend of Jacobs, Coppola takes a casual stroll through Jacobs' world, stitching together a tale that puts the designer's sensibilities on display while offering sketchy biographical material: At the age of 15, Jacobs left home to live with his grandmother, a meticulously organized shopper. His widowed mother had remarried, and Jacobs didn't like the stepdad. 

    Perhaps biographical detail doesn't matter. Jacobs seems to live in a world ruled less by the accumulated sediments of his past than the cultural ether he inhales, absorbs, and, then, transforms. 

   Some have seen Coppola's film as a look at Jacobs's creative process, which includes attention to every detail of his looming show: from set design to the quality of the false eyelashes for models to the music he’ll play. I approached the movie as I would a visit to another planet, a journey into exotic and unfamiliar terrain.

    In the 2024 show, women wearing wigs bigger than beach balls, display their chalky, mannequin-like expressions and wear outsized clothing that falls slightly short of qualifying as housing. 

   The clothing seems part of a satirical joke. 

   Is it?

   Beats me.

    It probably helps to be familiar with the arc of Jacobs' career, which Coppola presents mostly with references -- from his stint at Perry Ellis to his mold-breaking work at Louis Vuitton, where he added humor and flash that stretched the Vuitton brand. 

   And, of course, there's Jacobs' fabled Grunge period, that moment in the 1990s when sighs over elegance were replaced by the enraged banshee screams of rockers and those who followed them. We even see a clip from Jacobs' days as a student at the Parsons School of Design.

   But Jacobs works in the real world, too -- sort of. He once designed clothes for Winona Ryder's shoplifting trial. 

    The movie can be amusing, although it seems directed at those who already know that Jacobs is a major designer whose work has proven influential. 

   Coppola doesn't tell us, by the way, where Jacobs, now 62, stands in relation to other contemporary designers. And she doesn't include much by way of outside observation about his work. A little more context would have been welcome.

    I've admired Coppola's work in movies such as The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), and The Bling Ring (2013). Nothing about Marc by Sofia made me think less of Coppola as a filmmaker, although it does seem like a bit of a digression.

 

    

     

An animated look at a filmmaker's life

      To appreciate the animated biopic, A Magnificent Life, a bit of background helps.

    The name Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974) may not have the same kind of resonance with American audiences as French directors such as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Even when it comes to movies of the 1930s, cineastes are probably more familiar with the work of Jean Renoir and Rene Clair, both of whom were Pagnol's contemporaries. 

   I'm being sketchy, of course, but I begin this way because Pagnol may be better known to French audiences than to American viewers. I'm not even sure Pagnol receives main-course treatment in American film schools.

    If anything, American audiences are familiar with Jean de Florette and Manon of the Springs, two 1986 movies directed by Claude Berrie and adapted from a pair of Pagnol's novels.

     Director Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Bellville) has taken on the challenge of bringing Pagnol's life to light with A Magnificent Life, a  Pagnol biography that's animated with detail, style, and affection. Chomet creates an encompassing world for a story about a multi-talented artist who wrote novels, plays, and directed films for which he also wrote the screenplays.

   Chomet tells the story with flashbacks, beginning in 1974. Presumably finished with creating, Pagnol is asked to write articles for Elle magazine. Writing proves difficult, partly because Pagnol’s memory has begun to fade. Enter a young Marcel, a character who serves to trigger memories of the author’s life and give the movie a whimsical touch. Pagnol chats with his younger self.

   An early episode recounts the death of Pagnol's mother. Fifteen at the time of his mother's death, Pagnol already had begun writing poetry. Mom had been his primary audience; her loss proved devastating. 

   The story then finds Pagnol, as a young married man, teaching Latin in Marseille. When he was transferred to Paris, a move he celebrated, his wife objected, but Pagnol's life as a writer began in earnest.

    Chomet goes through the major events in Pagnol's  life: his Paris successes, his return to Marseille, and his work with French actor Raimu, depicted here in amusingly boisterous fashion.

    We also learn about Pagnol's loves and his commitment to putting the Marseille accent into a trilogy of films (Marius, Fanny, and Cesar) released during the 1930s. Perhaps foreshadowing what we think of as "series" storytelling, the films followed the same characters for years. 

    Like all lives, Pagnol's had rough spots. In 1954, he lost his two-and-half-year-old daughter, Estelle. He took more than 10 years before making another film. 

     I saw a dubbed English-language version of A Magnificent Life, which eventually lost steam, as it drew from Confidences, a collection of Pagnol's essays. 

   Chomet's animation creates an absorbing world that brings its own rewards, but the movie does as much telling as showing, and in the end, makes a better showcase for Chomet's talent than for Pagnol's significance as an artist. 

Space travels of an unlikely duo

    On its surface, Project Hail Mary sounds like another large-scale space adventure, a movie in which a lone traveler must save the Earth when a virus threatens to dim the sun. A mysterious microbe known as Astrophage is responsible for this doomsday scenario.

   Fortunately, Earth has hope for survival, albeit a slim one. The future of humanity depends on a molecular biologist -- Ryan Gosling's Ryland Grace -- traveling 11.9 light-years to Tau Ceti, a star that’s immune to Astrophage. Perhaps an antidote can be discovered and brought back to Earth. 

    It's a last-ditch, long-shot effort with no guarantee  of success, but it's the only option.

   Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse) shift away from the usual space-genre tone, bypassing ominous cosmic references and occasionally indulging in sentiment.

    Distinguished by its use of sets and avoidance of green-screen work, the movie has a down-to-earth flavor, even as it vaults toward a distant galaxy. The approach is in keeping with Drew Goddard's screenplay, which immediately confronts Grace with the series of problems that propel the story. 

   When he awakens from his induced slumber, Grace can't remember who he is or how he happened to find himself on a spaceship. Job one: Read the clues that will help him recover his memory.

    Grace seems an unlikely hero. The story begins with him teaching seventh-grade science, after having been rejected by scholars for advancing a thesis the scientific establishment scorned; i.e., that life needn't be water-based. Grace's brilliance was mocked.

     Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller) heads an international organization that recruits Grace for the Hail May Project. Eva admires the fact that Grace is willing to think unconventionally, even if others don't accept his conclusions. 

     So, Grace enters deep space, quickly learning that his companions on his voyage had failed to awaken from their induced sleep. He becomes the solo savior of his planet.

     Well, not quite.

      En route to his destination, Grace encounters an alien ship on which a creature he names Rocky also has been traveling.

     James Ortiz does the voice work for Rocky, filling the character with innocent charm and making the most of the way Rocky struggles to understand a new language, sometimes to comic effect.

   Grace's alien buddy may look like a leggy rock, but by no means is he as dumb as one. An engineer by trade, he builds a bridge between the two ships. Rocky, we learn, misses the spouse he left on his home planet; he, too, has lost his crew, and, like Grace, he has tried to adjust to being alone.

   The screenplay adds poignancy because scientists on Earth have equipped Grace's ship with enough fuel to reach its destination, but not enough for a return trip. (The ship, by the way, runs on Astrophage, an odd bit of irony.) Additionally, Grace must mourn the death of his fellow travelers (Ken Leung and Milana Vayntrub), both of whom he hardly knew.

     Project Hail Mary is based on a popular 2021 novel by Andy Weir, who also wrote The Martian, which became another big-screen space adventure built around loneliness and ingenuity. 

     By the time Rocky enters the picture, screenwriter Drew Goddard has begun employing flashbacks to allow Huller's character to develop and to provide additional insight into Grace's pre-flight life. Gosling carries the movie with ease in a showcase role.

     A set piece in which Grace and Rocky try to recover fuel is built for excitement, but other space shots lack the feeling of dark emptiness that can make life feel puny, meek, and insecure.

    Entertaining and involving -- if overly long at 156 minutes -- Project Hail Mary occasionally struck me as silly. Rocky, after all, isn't the most intriguing looking of creatures. I also found the cuteness of the movie's epilogue off-putting, making me think I'd witnessed an adventure that couldn't resist painting a smiley face on its intergalactic surface. 

     Still, Project Hail Mary offers relief from the interplanetary bloviation of other space epics, serving as an antidote to the self-seriousness with which Hollywood usually plies the depths of space. 

     The message also merits consideration: Forget Aliens and its many successors; other forms of life just might turn out to be our BFFs.

      

A second helping of comic gore

  

     It has been seven years since the release of Ready or Not, a jokey, gory slice of horror that pitted a new bride (Samara Weaving) against wealthy in-laws intent on protecting their privilege. I hadn’t thought about the movie until I learned that a second helping was in the offing. I rewatched the original, and remembered why I enjoyed it while also recognizing that blood, gook, and fear aren’t everyone’s favorite popcorn seasonings.

    The same mini-review might apply to Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, a movie in which co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett make good use of Weavings’ fierce determination and find reasonably clever ways to revive the Ready or Not strategy.

   Once again, Weaving's Grace must survive a deadly hunt in which she’s the prey, this time at the cruel behest of a fiendish cabal composed of sects vying to head a coalition of Satanic cultists who claim to control the world.

    And once again, Grace takes a beating that leaves her wounded, bloodied, and in bad need of a shower.

   Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett repeat the formula, adding gory flourishes and making enough references to the original to connect the two movies -- if not in plot, then in spirit. 

   A major addition involves providing Grace with a fellow sufferer, her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton). Faith resents her older sister for fleeing to New York at the age of 18. Fifteen at the time, Faith was left in foster care.

     Forget the Le Domas family of the previous movie and glide past the movie’s devilish mumbo-jumbo. Focus instead on the brutal game played at a sprawling Connecticut  estate.

    The hunters compete to head the council, the governing body of the movie’s greedy Satan worshippers. Hunters must use weapons that were common during the period in which their forbearers joined the group. We're talking axes, pistols, bazookas, rifles, knives, and more.

      The large cast includes Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy as cunning siblings who want to rule the clans. They’re joined by an embittered woman (Maia Jae) who once was engaged to the man Grace married in the first installment. Other characters may be less well-drawn. Some don’t do much more than add to the body count.

      Elijah Wood signs on as The Lawyer, the character who defines the rules of the game, and horror master David Cronenberg makes an early appearance as the father of the twins.

      The simmering conflict between the sisters can feel  forced, and the blend of comedy and gore can’t help but feel familiar. An overstated grand finale of blood and exploding bodies serves as an icky exclamation point to the proceedings.

      One could slice and dice further, but as second helpings go, Here I Come proves a reliably amusing bloodbath, particularly for those who like their violent mayhem served with stinging comic twists.

Goodbye Oscar. Let's move on

    Somebody mentioned that the 98th edition of the Academy Awards happened Sunday night. 

    I heard the show went long (3 hours and 32 minutes),  that one group of recipients got played off the stage, and that host Conan O'Brien delivered a strong opening with a Weapons parody in which he appeared as Amy Madigan's character from that film, the unforgettable Gladys. 

     O'Brien also closed the evening with a clever riff on One Battle After Another, but by that time, all the awards had been handed out, and some viewers probably already had had enough.

     His monologue? I heard, "meh."

     OK, it’s not hearsay. I watched.

     But I decided to change-up this year and wait until the morning after to see what -- if anything -- stuck from the night before. 

     Oscar managed to turn Leonardo DiCaprio -- a nominee for best actor for One Battle After Another -- into a supporting character. When One Battle won best picture, I had to search for Leo in the back row of all the film's actors. Fortunately, his Clark Gable mustache made him easy to spot.

      Teyana Taylor, a losing nominee for supporting actor (One Battle After Another) seemed more pumped up than any of the winners. If there were an award for best adrenalin rush, she'd have won it.

       I was glad to see Autumn Durand Arkapaw become the first woman to win an Oscar for best cinematography for her work on Sinners. 

      It was equally rewarding to watch Michael B. Jordan take the best actor award for playing a dual role in Sinners. 

      By the end of the evening, though, I was starting to feel sorry for early best actor front-runner Timothee Chalamet, who looked a little silly to me in his all-white outfit. I wouldn't have voted for him, but Chalamet's off-key comment about opera and ballet was mocked during the ceremony, although it probably didn't figure in his loss.

     I say that even though I wasn't a Marty Supreme fan.

     Despite the hype about a too-close-to-call best-picture race between Sinners and One Battle After Another, One Battle emerged victorious, the outcome that had been most predicted from the start of an interminable awards season.

      Sinners wound up winning four Oscars after earning a record 16 nominations. One Battle After Another took six of its 13 nominations.

     It was moving and appropriate to see the Academy offer extended In Memoriam tributes to Robert Redford (Barbra Streisand presided), Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle Singer Reiner (Billy Crystal did the honors) and Diane Keaton and Catherine O'Hara (Rachel McAdams led the way). 

      In her acceptance speech for best actress, Hamnet's Jessie Buckley said she was ready to have 20,000 children with her partner. I can't knock celebrating motherhood, but, geez, wouldn't 10,000 suffice? 

      Aside from Javier Bardem, Jimmy Kimmel, a few barbs from Conan, and a pointed cautionary speech from David Borenstein, co-director of the best documentary, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the night was less political than expected, considering the fraught moment we’re living through.

      Jackie Cazares, a mom who lost a daughter in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, spoke when All the Empty Rooms won Best Documentary Short Film.  One of our great sadnesses is that school shootings have become so much less shocking in the 26 years since Columbine.

      The best live action short category resulted in a rarity, a tie with Two People Exchanging Saliva and The Singers each getting an equal number of votes. 

      Amy Madigan, the best supporting actress for her work in Weapons, might be the first Oscar recipient to reference shaving her legs in the shower. Wow, an actual human being wins an Oscar.

      Someone noted that the awards didn’t have the indie spirit that seems to have dominated recent Oscar seasons. Warner Bros., a studio that may soon be acquired by Paramount Skydance, released both One Battle After Another and Sinners. Sinners did better than One Battle at the box office, but neither movie can be seen as typical Hollywood fare. 

       Still, after being nominated for nine Academy Awards, Marty Supreme, released by the adventurous film company, A24, didn't win any. 

       Bugonia, Hamnet, The Secret Agent, and Sentimental Value -- all of which can be regarded as independent features -- earned a total of 25 nominations, but won in only two categories: best actress (Buckley for Hamnet) and Best International Feature (Sentimental Value). 

        The first-ever award for casting went to Cassandra Kulukundis for her work on One Battle After Another. I'd love to have heard the directors of each of the nominees in that category explain the role the casting director played in making their films successful.

       Where will the awards stop? Lots of folks think stunts deserve an award. How about catering? Animal wrangling, anyone? Just sayin'. 

       Sean Penn, this year's best supporting actor, was a no- show. Maybe -- like many of us -- he'd had enough of awards season. 

        If you judged by the audience, you might have thought that Sinners was the only movie anyone truly loved. It seemed to earn more applause than anything else. 

        That's it from me about Oscar 98. I don't know about you, but I think it's time to leave 2025 behind. 

Oscar predictions for 2026

One Battle After Another and Sinners find themselves in a battle for best picture.

   Yeah, I know. It's almost mid-March, and we're still talking about 2025 -- at least when it comes to movie awards. Oscars will be handed out on Sunday evening. If you search for Oscar predictions online, you'll find no shortage of guess work, intuitive hunches, and analytical explanations for what’s likely to transpire. 

   I've always approached the prediction game with reservations, prompted this year in part by a lack of strong rooting interests on my part. Jessie Buckley seems a shoo-in for best actress, but I wouldn't be upset if Rose Byrne won for her performance in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. 

   I prefer Sinners to One Battle After Another, but either movie would make a decent best picture winner.

   Sure, Sean Penn is the favorite in the best supporting actor category for playing a right-wing nut job in One Battle After Another, but if Stellan Skarsgard pulled off a major upset by winning in this category for his performance as a film director in Sentimental Value, my life -- and probably yours -- will remain unaffected.

   Moreover, the awards season has become so long, so televised, and so covered by the press that by the time Oscar rolls around, I'm well past ready to move on.

   Still, Oscar remains the big prize, so I'll offer predictions in some of the major categories.

Best Picture: One Battle After Another.  

     This one boils down to a two-picture race pitting One Battle After Another against Sinners, which received a major boost when Sinners’ star Michael B. Jordan won best actor at the Screen Actors Guild awards. Other professional groups have gone for One Battle. 

      Here's a stray thought. What if the two frontrunners wind up providing another movie with a window of possibility. In the old days, I'd have speculated that Hamnet --a more traditional choice for best picture -- might have emerged victorious.  This year: Not likely.

Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another. I don't regard One Battle as Anderson's best movie; it’s not as good as Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master, or Phantom Thread. But Anderson is a strong stylist, a sometime visionary, and a director with a clear, idiosyncratic sensibility that’s woven into all his work. He's had 14 nominations and has never won. He's a major director who’s past due.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another, an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel, Vineland. Anderson updated the story but kept Pynchon's raucous spirit alive throughout his movie. There's no real competition in this category.

Best Original Screenplay: Ryan Coogler for Sinners. Coogler brought sharp relevance to a genre mashup of a movie that employed an expansive cinema vocabulary but spoke in a distinctive voice. 

Best Actor: Michael B. Jordan. Jordan played twins who moved back to their Mississippi hometown to start a juke joint. Magnetic in dual roles, Jordan likely will beat out Timothee Chalamet's uber-driven performance in Marty Supreme. Why? Because Marty Supreme isn't likely to receive big love in other categories.

Best Actress: Jessie Buckley, Hamnet. There's simply no competition in the only category on which everyone seems to agree. 

Best Supporting Actor: Sean Penn, One Battle After Another. If not Penn, Delroy Lindo of Sinners might provide one of the evening's surprises. 

Best Supporting Actress: Amy Madigan's supporting performance made the horror movie Weapons a hit. Even if you don't like horror, you'd have to acknowledge that an unrecognizable Madigan stole the movie. If not Madigan, keep an eye on Wunmi Mosaku, who played hoodoo healer Annie in a role that gave Sinners a soulful boost.

Some bonus picks: Best International Feature, Sentimental Value. Best Animated Feature, Kpop Demon Hunters. Best Documentary, The Perfect Neighbor. Best cinematography, One Battle After Another.

Another Colleen Hoover romance

  Reminders of Him, the latest adaptation of a best-selling Colleen Hoover novel, takes us to Laramie, Wyoming, but the film could have been shot anywhere, a clue that we might have wandered into formula territory.

  The characters in Reminders of Him don't seem rooted in any specific landscape or location; they spring from a blueprint built around romance and obstacles, ingredients that have been seasoned with tragedy.

  Maika Monroe (Longlegs) gives a credible performance as Kenna, a young woman who, at the film's start, is released from prison after serving five years for vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence. Kenna's boyfriend, Scotty (Rudy Pankow), was killed in the accident. 

  Guilt-ridden and shaken, Kenna pleaded guilty -- even though the situation turned out to be more complicated than initially suspected. 

   The newly released Kenna has one goal. She wants to see her daughter (Zoe Kosovic), a girl who was born in prison and taken from her. She has never held the child, who’s being raised by Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford), Scotty’s unforgiving parents. They've structured a legal arrangement to keep Kenna away from her daughter Diem. 

    That's plenty of dramatic fodder. But what’s a movie such as this without romance? Enter Ledger (Tyriq Withers), a childhood friend of Scotty’s who owns a local bar. Ledger didn’t know Kenna previously because when Scotty was courting her, he was trying to launch a career with the Denver Broncos. When he blew out a shoulder, his athletic career crashed. By the time he returned home, Scotty already was dead.

    All drama hinges on some sort of contrivance; in Reminders of Him, they're awfully transparent. For five years, Ledger has been developing a close relationship with Diem, serving as a kind of surrogate father — at least that’s how he sees it.

     Kenna and Ledger know their relationship will threaten Ledger’s bond with Scotty’s parents and with Diem, who’s as cute as the kitten Kenna's landlady gives her when she moves into the low-rent but  ironically named Paradise apartments.

      At various times, Kenna narrates the film, reading excerpts from the notebooks she began to fill in prison. These consist of letters written to her late boyfriend.

     The supporting characters include a charmingly blunt young woman with Down’s syndrome (Monika Meyers) who Kenna meets when she lands a job bagging groceries.

   The story unfolds in predictably delivered slices that don’t grate on the nerves but unfold smoothly in the hands of director Vanessa Caswill, working from a screenplay by Hoover and Lauren Levine.

     Neither offensive nor deep, Reminders of Him glides past complexities that might have made for a more involving story. The movie follows on the heels of two other Hoover adaptations, It Ends with Us and Regretting You. It improves on the latter but isn't as strong as the former. 

     Hoover’s fans evidently are devoted enough to propel these movies into the profit column, even when they feel, as this one does, more anemic than any melodrama should.

       

A horror movie relies on sound

 Canadian director Ian Tuason makes his directorial debut with Undertone, a narrowly focused horror movie that concentrates on a podcaster who, with a partner, devotes her time to debunking paranormal claims. 

 Evy (Nina Kiri) spends most of the movie alone, preparing or recording her podcast while her mother (Michele Duquet) is dying in an upstairs bedroom. Evy has temporarily moved into her mother’s home for what amounts to a prolonged death watch.

  Evy’s podcast partner, Justin — a heard but not seen Adam DiMarco — believes that a series of disturbing recordings he has received might be authentic. Evy agrees to listen but plays her customary role as the pair's resident skeptic.

   Tuason's camera often isolates Evy in a darkened corner of a house that's filled with her mother’s Catholic paraphernalia — small statues of Mary, a picture of the Last Supper, crosses, and other cliches that usually turn up in films about possession.

    As the two partners listen to the audio files — 10 in all — tension mounts, and Tuason suggests a few psychological possibilities. Evy learns that she’s pregnant; she backslides on her sobriety, and she’s increasingly spooked by noises in the house. Lights  turn on and off by themselves. Faucets mysteriously begin running. Old stuff indeed, but wrapped in a minimalist package.

   The major question involves whether Evy is slipping into a state of psychological distortion or whether a demon — in this case, one responsible for mothers who kill their children — could have been summoned when the tapes were played. Eerie nursery rhymes -- Baa Baa Black Sheep, for example -- are repetitively employed.

    Tuason's audio-orientation relies on suggestive sound design, which includes snippets from the audio files that Justin receives. He sometimes plays them backward as he searches for hidden meanings.

     Films such as Undertone depend heavily on their finales. Tuason cloaks his with mostly darkened images and heightened sound, a maneuver suggested by preceding developments, but which seems too gimmicky to be entirely satisfying.

     Credit Kiri with holding the screen. And at its creepiest, Undertone casts a creepy spell. When it's all said and done, though, the movie doesn't dig deeply enough into what increasingly seems like an accumulation of familiar genre tropes.