She is always listening
dir: Ian Tuason
2026
There might not be anything scarier than the thought of looking after your parents as they lay dying.
Based on a dedication at the end of the credits, this director spent around three years looking after both of his parents as they slowly declined, in the house the movie is entirely set within, and, yes, it can take a lot out of you, and affect your mind in ways you couldn’t have imagined.
Years after the fact, I sometimes still hear my dad cry out for help in my sleep, and wake up terrified that I’ve let him down again.
So, it would be counterproductive and awfully precious to claim that this film undertone is targeting those members of the audience who’ve had this experience of looking after a parent or loved one as the sands ever so slowly, then abruptly, and then slowly again, run out of their hourglass. The movie takes that as its basis, as in, the experience of going nuts as you’re providing that level of care for someone, too afraid to leave the house in case something happens, desperate to get away to breath, painstakingly doing all the things you can to keep them alive, while wondering how much longer it can possibly take, and smushes it together with a podcast / audio experience from Hell weaving in contemporary ‘true crime’ type tropes and ancient myths.
As if it wasn’t horrifying enough already.
There is not a single drop of blood displayed in this film, not a single weapon raised in anger or defence, and yet it manages to be one of the most deeply disturbing flicks that I’ve watched this year. I say ‘watched’ but what transpires is terrifying more for what you hear rather than what we see.
No-one needs to tell me that how Evy (Nina Kiri) and Justin (Adam DiMarco) do their podcast doesn’t make a lot of sense, but this isn’t a film you watch for sense and sensibility. How they work is their business, and how that’s integrated into the film overall will greatly impact on whether a viewer finds it credible or not.
The thing is, we start to get the sense that Evy isn’t entirely grounded in reality as we know it. She seems to be… slipping. Of course there are good reasons for that, but the stress and the toll of looking after her mother, and her mother getting closer to death means Evy isn’t sleeping, or at least she doesn’t realise when she’s sleeping or not, and she’s started drinking again, which rarely if ever indicates solid choices being made.
Her friend on the podcast being geographically far away means they generally record their podcast at what I think is meant to be 3am. That time keeps cropping up over the course of the movie, because every time it gets close to 3am, or gets to 3am on the dot, things start going screwy.
With everything going on, Evy still wants to do the podcast, so… Their latest episode is about a number of sound files mysteriously emailed to them by someone at something email address dot com. Justin naturally thinks everything they ever investigate is probably true, and Evy generally thinks they’re bullshit, and that holds true here as well. In a stunning act of complete negligence, instead of checking out the contents of these files before they record their podcast, or, even worse, play the last two files during an episode where they have the public call in unvetted, they listen to the contents ‘live’ so that their reactions are ‘authentic’.
I’m all for authenticity, but that’s nuts. The mysterious contents of the sound files start off harmless sounding and just get progressively weirder, even as Evy stops being able to be certain whether what she’s listening to is happening in her headphones or in reality. And quite often, strange things happen around her, even as she knows her mother is bedbound and catatonic, that indicate that someone is fucking with her, whether it’s her mother or not.
Since their podcast deals with urban legends, memes and the kinds of mysteries underpinning our collective unconscious fears, and even some hoary old clichés like playing things backwards in order to hear satanic messages, a whole mess of stuff gets introduced that could make you think “there was plenty to be freaked out about here already, do we need Mesopotamian demons that want to eat people’s babies or what the true meaning of the song “Baa baa black sheep” really is all about?
And played backwards you hear a whispering voice say “rhubarb rhubarb, John Lennon’s still alive?”
I’m of two minds about that aspect of it, because the primary aspect, being Evy’s dire circumstances, are far more relatable and pressing. That she’s losing her marbles is disturbing. That she’s pregnant as well, on top of all of that’s going on, is like perhaps the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
The real, fundamental problem, though, is guilt. She explains why at the end during the most hellishly out of place monologue you could ever imagine, and it’s still a gut punch, even as catastrophe and chaos reign around her in the film’s last moments.
There is something strong here, something personal. It’s always good, no, scratch that, it’s sometimes good when creators take something painful from their lives and transform it into something fantastic, but it’s possibly too strong.
That last section of the film left me terrified and really disturbed. Getting there was a long, slow burn, of unsettling atmosphere and impeccable sound design to really convey the darkness that Evy is terrified of. I wish I could joke and say the film is really a call to arms in order to support people looking after their dying loved ones, or a condemnation of aged services and hospice care, but it seems to be working on a set of fears more primal than that.
We only ever get to see one person 99% of the time, and that’s Evy, and to her credit she gives a tremendous performance as someone somehow able to sustain looking increasingly more freaked out as the movie rolls along. She’s able to convey very clearly how terrible the circumstances are that she finds herself in, but she’s always just on the edge of finding out something even worse is on its way. Really solid.
As well as the remarkable audio work, the cinematographer Graham Beasley does some amazing camera trickery to keep Evy in frame but to tilt her world through canted angles to make sure we’re never onside, never comfortable, never at ease, even though every bit of the camerawork is fluid and controlled.
I have no idea what else this team or these peeps will ever achieve in their lives, and I hope it’s something grand for all concerned. I wonder whether this director has anything left for other movies, of whether it will be endless retreads and reiterations of this flick. I’ll still watch ‘em. I’ll cue up with all the other middle-aged Comic Book Guy weirdos, in the same way that I’ll always check out what Jennifer Kent, Ari Aster or Goran Stoleskvi ever do because their first films were so magnificent, I will have to keep an eye or ear on Ian Tuason.
Even if he squanders his talents making a new Paranormal Activity instalment / reboot / remake.
8 times how dare they sully the good name of Eleanor of Aquitaine in the course of this evil endeavour out of 10
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“Don’t be afraid of the dark. Be afraid of the silence” – I can do both - undertone
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