Overtone – Movie Meister Reviews

Released: 25th July
Seen: 9th August

In 1927, the film The Jazz Singer came out and changed the world. While it was possibly the first film to use sound (depending on how we want to define it there are several candidates for the first sound picture), it was certainly the first to be popular and to allow the use of audible dialogue, and so, with the simple line “You ain’t heard nothing yet”, that film entered the history of cinema as an important benchmark (even though that benchmark comes with a notable history of racism… but so does most early cinema, let’s be honest). Since then, sound has been an essential element of the cinematic experience; it can make or break a film. There are countless stories of films that were deemed to be bad because they didn’t have the soundtrack completed yet, a bad sound mix can make a serious scene into an accidental comedy, there’s an absolutely hilarious version of the trailer for The Mummy that muted the wrong audio track which became the only interesting thing about that movie. Sound is important and so when a horror film sells itself on its sound by saying it’s the scariest movie you’ll ever hear you hope that it can deliver on that… in the cast of Undertone, it sounds good but I’ve heard scarier.

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