fantasia

‘SON OF SARA’ is a Goopy Queer Spin on a Horror Classic
Vortex Media

Rosemary’s Baby for “___” is a spicy logline. I’m coming out of Fantasia where I consumed a few movies that might fit that bill (Nightborn coming in hot as a “Rosemary’s Baby for elder millennials,” Home Bodies making me consider “Rosemary’s Baby as liminal science fiction”). And that’s just this year. There’s a reason the story of a cursed child resonates and continues to bleed through horror canon, something similar to how a year can barely lapse without a Frankenstein adaptation. Pregnancy and birth are brilliant miracles that are also monstrous and parasitic, a balance Houston Bone plays with in his tale of a woman as a reluctant vessel.

Son of Sara follows Sara’s (Chloe Van Landschoot) experience with an unexpected pregnancy resulting from a quick tryst with a blonde guy named Troy (Garrett Hnatiuk as the guy you warn your friends about). She’s living in only mild discomfort with her girlfriend, Carol (Tymika Tafari, a petite yet commanding presence) struggling with the pain of pregnancy, haunting visions, and an insatiable hunger. When she bumps into Troy, her curiosity is sparked, and she takes an ill-advised journey to the farmhouse he shares with his witchy mother (Jane Moffat, tantalizing as Agnes). Things feel immediately odd – odder than sharing a meal with your one-night-stand-baby-daddy’s mom while regaling her with stories of your current partner –when Agnes and Troy seem to be setting Sara up for a ritualistic birth.

The early part of the film is simply a setup for the drawn-out torment of the pregnant mother. Hnatiuk and Moffat get to ham it up while we watch Sara struggle with weakness, eventually preparing themselves for their big moment as the catchers of a tainted fetus. The two bring such a berserk and balanced tone of comedy, sexiness, and terror to their eccentric characters which fills up the long ritual scenes with something delicious to eat. Van Landschoot’s physical performance portrays the fear and pain of an unflappable newly minted matriarch in a way that makes their stand off more delectable. Scares and gore prop up the aforementioned tonal balance and set up a hero moment of Carol that left the audience cheering.

Bone didn’t just pilot a cast through a hammy tale of a grotesque birth, he set up his take on the famous horror story, a queer one with a new take on how women fit into it. The relationship between the couple, Sara and Carol, is what keeps them both safe in a story where the pregnant woman is traditionally manipulated and exploited. The dynamic changes when the two women are preparing to be parents and are upended by the appearance of the man who had otherwise just been a seed. Son of Sara isn’t explicitly spending time on testing themes, but it doesn’t have to. It’s presenting a modern telling of this sort of story that allows the viewer to pull from it how these new dynamics might change things. And that horror classic does not appear to be his only inspiration, nods appearing from Japanese horror, slashers, and probably more that even a keen horror eye might miss.

Son of Sara is a spectacle of a monstrous childbirth wrapped in a story about love, care, and following your instincts. Elevated by powerful performances and drenched in burgundy blood and a good amount of bites, it’s a goopy fun romp that’ll have the audience gagging and gagged.

‘Undertone’ is High Fidelity Horror That’s a Tight, Relentless, Sonic Terror
VVS Films/ Dustin Rabin

When it was still doing the festival circuit, I listed Undertone as one of the best horror movies coming out of Fantasia 2025. I described it as being like experiencing Paranormal Activity if it was in audio format, so it delighted but didn’t surprise me that during the run, director Ian Tuason was grabbed to helm the eighth installment. Now with a shiny new title card from A24, fresh voice acting (hello, Adam DiMarco), a tightened title (“drop the ‘the’”), and a tenser edit (from Sonny Atkins), Undertone is ready to terrify a larger audience with its punishing audio track.

Evy (Nina Kiri) and Justin (DiMarco) are a pair of podcast hosts who squeeze recordings into their challenging schedules. Justin is recording from the UK and Evy is marooned to her childhood home to provide support for her mother’s palliative care, so the duo records their spooky show at 3:00am her time. Typically playing off each other as the skeptic-versus-the-believer exploring supernatural true crime phenomena, the two enter strange new territory when they live record their reactions to ten audio clips sent to the show via cryptic email. The clips start off like the early moments in the aforementioned Paranormal Activity, with audio of Mike (Jeff Yung) recording his partner, Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas) talking in her sleep, but things escalate when Jessa starts singing haunting kid’s songs in reverse. The duo does their best to plow through the remaining audio to cobble together a compelling episode, but they’re often interrupted by a need for sleep, an urgent call, or a bump in the night.

Evy has mostly protected herself from fear with her skepticism, but that changes when she finds herself connecting more and more to the audio. As references to the demon Abyzou ramp up, Evy considers if she is the next target for a malevolent force whose screams seem to transcend her plane.

Again, Undertone lives and dies by its audio, the entire movie taking place in a single location with Evy’s headphones as a gateway between worlds. Every crunch of cereal, whistle of a kettle, or tick of a clock is an anti-ASMR stab in the ear creating a persistent sense of unease. The audio is invasive, taking up space in Evy’s home, asking the audience to consider what might have taken place just over her shoulder. Tuason and his DOP, Graham Beasley, went to the Mike Flanagan and Leigh Whannel school of weaponizing negative space and they use empty corners of Evy’s house to ask the audience to use their imaginations and the audio to fill in haunts. Shots of Evy’s back leave her looking so vulnerable to the tin cans placed atop her ears. The only faces we ever truly see are Evy’s and her mother’s, forcing us into her same isolation. Evy might leave the house, but the camera doesn’t and paired with toggling shots between Evy or the entity’s POV, it makes the entire experience claustrophobic forcing the audience to fester in dreadful seclusion.

Undertone is sometimes a grab bag of horror hits, taking its concept of an audio track as a conduit and decorating it with religious iconography, haunted songs and myths, and even a fugue state crayon scratch of something scary. But with that, its guerilla Canadian horror filmmaking at its finest; a liminal horror feature put together by scrappy bubbling creatives. The set is the director’s house, the audio clips were recorded before principal photography, and death rattles and in-world phone calls were recorded by sound guys into iPhones. Something that started with everyone on set placing objects in frame then hiding to add scares to long shots turned into an entire theater reacting to a mirror scare like the audience gasping at the wall climber in Hereditary.

Undertone is a refreshing flip on screen life that uses phone calls and audio clips to bring a large story into the small room of a target protagonist. Is it a lesson in catholic guilt for a skeptic who’s been avoiding her mother’s religious zeal? Perhaps. But above all, it’s a tight and contained terror that will leave audiences trying to find a way to use their blanket to cover their ears.

Undertone hists theaters March 13, 2026