Undertone Ending Explained And Movie Recap: Is Evy Possessed By Abyzou? 

For somebody like me who doesn’t care about podcasts, I really didn’t think I’d ever care about a podcaster, let alone a fictional one. But as life keeps surprising us, A24’s new horror feature, “Undertone,” surprised me as a viewer. Initially, I didn’t expect much, but as the main character puts her headphones on, the world around her goes silent, and the noise cancellation actually brings out the best of her, before things go to crap. The film is entirely carried on the shoulders of Nina Kiri, one of the two actors that actually appear in this film. The entire film is based on audio clips, and you hear scary stuff more than you actually see it, which makes the experience much better. I hope you all feel the way too, and without further ado, here’s everything that unfolds in “Undertone.”

Spoilers Ahead

What happens in the film?

Evy is a young woman who was raised as a devout Catholic by her mother, who now lies bedridden, unable to move or speak on her own. Her life is mostly spent taking care of her mother, and for money, Evy runs a horror podcast called “Undertone,” with her friend Justin. Their podcast is fairly popular, and the format is pretty simple too. Evy acts as the nonchalant rational character who refuses to believe the ghost stories, and Justin is the one who’s more likely to believe that supernatural entities exist. The show is based on the stories they find, and the back and forth between them, but when Justin receives a mysterious email with ten audio clips, things start to get a bit uncomfortable. They decide to play the files, and it turns out they’ve been recorded by a man named Mike, who believes that his girlfriend, Jessa, talks gibberish in her sleep. When Mike skips to the time Jessa starts talking, she’s singing the nursery rhyme “London Bridge.” However, Justin finds there’s something weird about her tone, so he plays the recording in reverse, and he can hear Jessa saying “Mike Kill All.” Even though Evy is dismissive at first, and blames the incident on audio apophenia. However, Justin googles the rhyme, and he finds out that the “London Bridge” rhyme has a dark secret in the pages of history. Eleanor of Provence, the queen consort of England, feared that London Bridge would collapse, and coincidentally, all of Queen’s nine children were dead. Some conspirators say that she put orphaned children inside the bridge’s foundation. Although there is no historical evidence to support this claim, you do get the sense that Mike and Jessa’s problems aren’t remotely normal, and it only keeps getting worse. 

Who is Abyzou?

Evy is all alone in taking care of her mother, and her boyfriend, Darren, couldn’t care less. We see her getting worried when the doctor tells her that her mother doesn’t have long to live, but all Darren wants is to host a party in his apartment. Evy tries to make it in time, but finds her mother has soiled herself just as she’s about to leave. She also notices that there’s a morbid sketch in her drawer, which looks like a woman killing her baby. After the London Bridge conspiracy, Evy looks up her favourite rhyme, “Ba Ba Black Sheep,” which also has a disturbing message when it’s sung in reverse. She discovers that the song says “Lick the Blood off,” another made up thing, but let’s just play along shall we. Evy discovers that she’s pregnant as well, so she breaks the news to her mother, who can barely register anything her daughter says. Weirdly enough, she finds a candle figurine of Virgin Mary on her mother’s bedside table, and it can’t be normal that Evy just happens to find one, in her own house. Justin and she start listening to the other tapes, and Jessa is only getting worse. The next clip sounds like a whole lot of nothing, but after listening closely, it sounds like Jesse is saying “Uozyba-ni-emoc,” and if you reverse the words, it says, “Come in, Abyzou.” The craziest part is, without even realising it, we see Evy repeating the chant after Jessa. Abyzou is a demon who appears in “The Testament of Solomon.” She’s identified with infant death and miscarriages, and she was infertile herself, which gave birth to her rage and jealousy for women who could bear a child. She would kill newborn babies in the dark, so King Solomon had her hanged. As a demon, Abyzou would cause miscarriages and stillborns. Before you know it, Jesse starts seeing things, hearing things, and she even claims that she saw a baby in the sink. Even the email address that sent the audio clips to Justin, says Come in Abyzou,  spelled backwards. 

What happened to Abyzou’s victims? 

After some research, Evy gets to know that there’s a psychologist who tried to treat two patients who were fixated on “Come in Abyzou” spelled backwards. The first patient spent days texting it to random numbers before she drowned her nine-month-old daughter in the kitchen sink. The other patient was a ceramic artist by trade, who made hundreds of figurines of dead children, and gifted them to her neighbors. She eventually killed herself, and guess what, she was pregnant as well. Evy also has a nightmare where Abyzou talks to her, and she hears the demon telling her to cause carnage, especially against kids. When Justin and Evy play another audio track, Jessa says that she saw a shadow beside her, and when she started to pray, hoping it’d go away, the shadow started praying with her. She then claims that it was her own shadow, and starts to laugh hysterically. Justin notices that his clocks are acting weird, saying it’s about to be three in the morning, while in reality, it’s only evening. They start taking calls from their listeners, a guy introduces himself as the neighbor of Mike and Jessa. Apparently, they were found dead in their house, with plastic bags wrapped around their heads. They also had dead babies drawn all over the walls, and it’s all the more unnerving because, throughout the time of this recording, Evy has been sketching dead babies non stop. A second caller says that she had a tenant who’d blast music super loud, and her father found the woman killing her baby by putting the child inside a garbage bag and banging the kid against the furnace. 

Is Evy Possessed By Abyzou? 

The podcasters decide to play the final audio track, despite Justin’s hesitation, and this is where the real horror starts. Jessa is burning up from fever, and Mike doesn’t know what to do. She claims that somebody is listening, and she needs to warn the listener. Jessa then runs away, and sings “lick all the blood off now,” from the Ba Ba Sheep poem. The audio track won’t play anymore, and it’s clearly corrupted. We see Evy’s wall clock, it’s 3 AM now, the witching hour. When Justin tries to play the recording once again, a loud static consumes both of them, and Jessa is wailing. Ba Ba Black Sheep plays again, but it sounds like a group of children are singing it. The voice then shifts to a lot of babies crying, and it’s so loud that one of the lamps in Evy’s house explodes. A third caller calls to inform them that they shouldn’t have played the final recording, as Abyzou waits in there in the witching hour. Even if there were no ghosts involved, this is enough to fry a sane person’s brain, and that’s exactly what happens to Justin and Evy. A fourth caller calls them to ask for Mary, and her baby won’t stop crying. The woman doesn’t know how to stop her baby from crying so loud, and she keeps asking for Mary. She introduces herself as Abby, and she claims that she’s no good. Evy tries to console her and convince Abby that she’s good, not making the simple connection that Abby is just short for Abyzou. She tells Abby that she killed her mother, as her mother would always pray for Evy when she was young and sick, but she never returned the favour when her mother got sick. When she stopped eating and moving, it was too late, and Evy felt that she killed her mother.  

Evy keeps telling Abby that she’s good, only for Abby to finally talk in her demonic voice, and tell her that it’s too late now. Ba Ba Black Sheep starts playing again, and now Evy and Justin can’t hear each other. Abby laughs hysterically over the call, and Justin screams and begs to somebody who’s inside his house. Evy’s table is now full of sketches of dying children, the lights start flickering, the taps turn on by themselves, the whole house is a mess. The lightbulbs in her house all start to pop one by one, until complete darkness surrounds her. Chants of Uozyba-ni-emoc (Come in Abyzou) are heard, and we see that, just like Jesse’s house, Evy has also covered the walls with the baby killing drawings. She runs upstairs to find that her mother is not on the bed anymore, and before you know it, Evy too, finally says, “Come in Abyzou.” There’s an absurd horror film called “Selfie from Hell,” which employs similar tropes to illustrate how demons can use technology to breach the veil separating our world from the realm of spirits. Now running a horror podcast, Evy would be a fool to not play such a great mysterious set of audio clips they received, but the fact that she was pregnant is what made her vulnerable to Abyzou, who’s known to latch on to pregnant women. So at the end of the day, I think the real question we should be asking ourselves is, why even make a baby? 

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