NINA KIRI star of UNDERTONE, HANDMAIDS TALE in conversation

Exceptional actor Nina Kiri talks UNDERTONE the paranormal podcast thriller successfully jolting audiences with it's sensational sound and practically solo performance by Nina. 

written, directed by Ian Tuason; also starring Michele Duquet, Adam DiMarco

Nina Kiri also in HANDMAIDS TALE, FINGERNAILS, LET HER OUT, GEEK CHARMING 

https://youtube.com/@movieanalystshaneadambassett?si=nZyw5fHIS4t_KgXj

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:30

Oh, yeah, that's a bit of fever ray, if I had a heart. Hello, my name is Shane A. Bassett, your host here at Cine Critique. Thanks for joining me, and today you will hear a conversation I had with Nina Keary, the uh wonderful, like such a talented actor that appears pretty much solo. Not quite, but 90% solo in the film Undertone. She plays Evie or Evangeline. And she's come a long way since Gig Charming and Supernatural Fingernails, which I only saw a year or so ago, with Jesse Buckley and Reza Med. Great movie that one. She was also in Letter Out, a Blu-ray that I've watched on several occasions, a very hard movie to find. But Undertone really does set the bar high. It's creepy. It's an indie film, but it's it's got remarkable sound and the visuals, well they're uh they're done in a mysterious manner. And they keep you on the edge of your seat, but it's all about the sound and all about the performance from Nina Curie. Now Nina Kiri plays this podcaster who is recording a podcast, and it's a true crime podcast, that art begins to imitate life.

SPEAKER_02 2:28

I'm your in-house skeptic, Evie Babbage, and Michael Lever, co-host, says he has a real treat for us today.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

We're listening to 10 mysterious audio recordings from an anonymous email.

SPEAKER_02 2:40

Are you implying there is hidden messages in it?

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Let me play it back in reverse.

SPEAKER_02 2:47

Play the next one. Let's find out.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

The vibe is high, and when you watch this movie, it it just it swips us around you. 360 degrees. You're thinking, you're looking, your brain is just exploding at what you're gonna see. Now I just remember well I just know that there's a a few spoilers uh that kind of get revealed in our interview. So if you were thinking of maybe uh listening to the interview, which I hope you are, because it's a great conversation I had with Nina, please uh maybe watch the movie first. Or if you don't mind spoilers, they're not huge, they're significant. I don't know. Anyway, I'm not normal when I interview people that we do speak a lot of spoilers, but in this case uh it just happened. But any anyway, it's a great conversation. If you want to find me, uh you can find me at movie underscore analyst, uh you can find me uh all around the place on radio, uh online and occasionally television. But for now, YouTube channel if you want to see this excellent interview, or you can listen right now. Here's Nina. Hey Nina, I'm Shane. It is an absolute pleasure to meet you.

SPEAKER_02 5:14

Nice to meet you as well, Shane.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Have you ever been down under uh you know to Australia to work or I mean anything at all down under at all? A holiday maybe?

SPEAKER_02 5:25

I have so um my whole dad's side of the family. I was born in Serbia, my whole dad's side of the family. So my grandparents and my aunt all moved to Melbourne in the 1980s. So I went to Melbourne quite a few times growing up to visit them. And my grandfather, who passed away two years ago at the age of 99, uh was part of the ex-Yugoslav club in Melbourne. So yeah, I have I have my own roots in Australia.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

We can call you an honorary Australian, maybe, right?

SPEAKER_02 5:55

Well, we were supposed to move to Australia, um, and then we it was you know hard to get visas, civil war, and then we ended up getting visas to Canada. We went to Canada, but we were on track to I was on track to be Australian. So I really am an honorary Australian.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

And of course, you worked with one of the great Aussies. Uh, I really like her a lot, Yvonne Strahovsky. Uh yes, great person. Yes. Oh, there you go. Another Aussie that you're at close with, at least.

SPEAKER_02 6:22

Yes, yes, that's true. She's an incredible person and actor.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Uh, you've come a long way uh since Geek Charming, uh Supernatural. I mean, your career is soaring. Would you agree? Like you've really come out of your shell and done all these different genres.

SPEAKER_02 6:39

Oh, I love that. Can I can you repeat that to me every day when I doubt myself? Yeah, I'm really, really happy with um the way things have gone. And I'm really lucky to have like worked as much as I have. And you know what's interesting is that in my years of Geek, in the Geek Charming years is when I started doing uh low budget horror movies. Okay. And then two of the directors that directed these like non-union horror films that I was in are producers on Undertone. So 10 years later, when they were wondering who to cast, they go, What about Nina? She did a bunch of our movies back in the day, and she's done her own thing since since. Um, we think she could be good. And that's the reason I was cast in this movie.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

What a great story. You know, directors and filmmakers remembered you from when you were like coming through the ranks. That is terrific.

SPEAKER_02 7:26

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

Um, let her out. I mean, I don't know if that was the one, but let her out's a Blu-ray that I've got that you're very good in as well. Uh and um fingernails, so yeah, I was serious about your career projection. It's soaring, and I think Undertone really is sealing that because it's basically you almost solo throughout with headphones on. Were were people feeding you lines, or was that something that just looked natural and you knew your lines?

SPEAKER_02 7:52

Uh so well, I I had to know my lines as much as I could, but um, there was a an actor upstairs reading the lines live. So every time I would actually call him, um, and then we would have the conversation. Um, and he ended up playing um the boyfriend Darren in the end. But so that that was a real live conversation that happened every time live. Uh, and then the recordings were recorded beforehand, but I heard them for the first time as we were doing those scenes.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Oh, okay. That the word makes sense because you have these reactions and these thought, what I call thought movements throughout.

SPEAKER_02 8:34

Right.

SPEAKER_01 8:35

That helped with the naturalism of your character.

SPEAKER_02 8:38

I think so. I think it really helped. And those were, I wasn't even expecting that. They kind of planned that for me, which I was really grateful for.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

I love the name of Angeline, which is your your name in the movie or Evie. Uh, I think that's very not uh it's memorable. I think it's just different. So that helped as well, I think.

SPEAKER_02 8:57

I agree.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

I I think it put me off listening to any kind of uh classic music or children's songs now, um, playing them backwards. It's something is a thing. I mean, it wasn't just for the movie. Did you have to do a bit of research for that or was it all in the script?

SPEAKER_02 9:15

It was all in the script. I honestly I in terms of research for podcasts and the auditory aspect, I didn't do a lot. And to be honest, in the beginning, I was going to, like I was kind of like, oh, maybe I'll start because I love listening to podcasts. I don't listen to true crime podcasts, but I listen to other podcasts all the time. Yeah. And then I was going to maybe try and base something off of what I heard. And then I thought, I don't, uh this isn't the same type of thing. And I don't want to try and bring in something that doesn't feel like the right tone. So I'm just gonna really hone in on the week that I have to prep of like, who is Evie? Where is she coming from? And how can I ground myself in her over and over and over and over again, knowing that I'm gonna be basically the only actor on set? Because I think in those situations, and I've been in those situations before where you're the only actor, you're kind of like occupying the space that nobody else is occupying. And if you don't have someone else to ground you in, you better have your own way of grounding yourself, or else you can kind of lose yourself in like, what does this look like? Is this scary? Because that's not what I should be doing, you know?

SPEAKER_01 10:18

No, I think the character you conveyed well because you're going through all these dilemmas uh personally and as well as with your mom, you're being a primary caregiver. And at one point you uh put some Irish whiskey in a coffee mug. So that's how you dealt with it. Uh, how did you get all those emotions happening, you know, throughout? Because you kept on being more on edge as the film went on. Was it filmed in uh, you know, sequence or not?

SPEAKER_02 10:43

So we did um the first week was just the conversations with Justin. Um, and but those were all in sequence. And then the second week we started working with Michelle, who played Mama. And then um, but it was all in sequence in the in the way that we could do without like you know, just veering too much. Um and then what I ended up doing is just being, I I really after reading the script a few times, I was like, this is really for me at least, approaching it as the actor is a story of denial um and loops of denial and loops of guilt. Like this is a person who keeps denying what they're feeling, and then because they're keep denying it, they have to deny it further and further and further, and it gets worse and worse and worse, much to like what we do in real life, which I have been guilty of um just kind of like not wanting to face my own demons and like really look at myself in the mirror. And so once I was aware of that with Evie, it just became a lot easier to map her um like destruction in that way. And then there would just be times when I'm like, okay, wait, hold on. We're doing this scene. When did you find out she was pregnant? Just situating myself um before we would do it, each scene.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Yeah, that that that was kind of dramatic and a great twist to the story of finding out about the pregnancy. Uh that that in turn made the ending a little bit more impactful. Um, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_02 12:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

Did you practice your screaming or did you have it down pat from all those years of the early horror movies?

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Oh, I don't need to practice screaming. Uh no, screaming I've I've never practiced. It's just dead, it's somewhere in my gut.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

Uh well, you're doing something right, that's for sure. It's it's good. Uh making the movie, were there any uh things like weird things that happened on set or to you personally? Any paranormal sort of stories or things haunting the set?

SPEAKER_02 12:39

Have you oh yeah. Um, so we so uh we shot that at Ian's home, and that's where he was caregiving for both of his parents who both died in that house in the rooms that we were shooting in. So very much their spirit was with us while we were making movie. And um, we all in the beginning were kind of like non-believers, and by the end, we're like, yeah, this is just there's too many coincidences that keep happening. Um, the lights flickered all the time. Okay, because they flicker in the movie, and you know, no, no, no, they flickered without like in the movie, it's like, okay, we did that because whatever, but like in between, while we're setting up, lights flickered all the time. And at first we were all like, and then after we all just accepted it. We're like, there's Abasou. Like we just um Yeah. Yeah, there were other things too, but um, honestly, it felt like a good spirit. It was it felt like something looking over us for this movie. So that was a a nice feeling, but there there was some points, like even in the beginning of the movie, I was my like holding area where me and the makeup artists would hang out all day, uh, was Ian's childhood bedroom. And he said to me, like, he's like, I had my first paranormal experience in this bedroom. And I'm like, Ian, no, I'm like, get out. I don't want to hear it because I'm about to enter this journey with you, and I can only handle so much.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

Yeah, I guess you can only take so much that's fact and fiction, right?

SPEAKER_02 14:09

Right. And I can only be open, like it's like like sometimes and I think the thing about denial, like going back to Evie's character, is sometimes you have to deny in order to survive. And um, sometimes you can open yourself up to everything that's happening, but sometimes you just don't have the mental capacity to, and you you deny in order to get through it, and then maybe later at a later point in your life, you can go back to it and process it. But like that, an example of me having to be like put up a wall, like no, I'm not going to get into your paranormal experiences right now because I have like a very intense job that I have to focus on right now, and I don't want to, I'm not, I'm not open to do that right now.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Well, certainly uh traditionally, if the there's something on the TV and you pull out the plug and the TV's still on, or there's chairs connected to the roof, you know there's something wrong, right?

SPEAKER_02 15:00

Something's going on. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:02

Uh now the sound, the sound is phenomenal. I'll ask about that in a second. And but uh I want to know about the camera movements because at times the camera sort of moved left and right really slowly, looked like it was one shot. So did you have marks around, you know, the house to to move to, or was it all trick photography?

SPEAKER_02 15:21

So the last scene, like the the one long take, was just one long take, and it wasn't like I had marks, but we kind of just had our own dance of like, okay, I'm gonna go here, you're gonna turn. And then actually, like some great things would just happen where I just happened to move right when he caught my shadow. And then that was such a like ended up being good for the story moment. Yes. And then, and then just like I love doing these one take moments because it feels like a play. You're like walking around and go behind him, get in front of him. Um, and I that was like one long take, and then um, yeah, it wasn't Mark's. It was more, there's such a small amount of people, it really didn't feel like okay, this is your mark and this is where you have to go. It was more like, okay, let's figure out in this tiny space where I can stand and you can stand so that it looks like what we're trying to do.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Well, were you aware of the sound? Because the sound is really intense and impactful for the film, but you know, was it recreated on set or put in later? Because the acting seemed to just match everything that was going on.

SPEAKER_02 16:27

A lot of that was put in later, which I um was very impressed by when I saw the movie. The only aspect of the sound that affected me was the noise-cancelling headphones, which I think were like incredible because it created such intimacy for me in a space where, like, you know, there's 20 people standing around me and I'm supposed to be alone. Uh, the headphones were really helpful for me for that. But the sound, I can't like I didn't, I wasn't aware of that to the extent to how incredible it is until I saw it.

SPEAKER_01 17:00

Well, you're you'd be an easy cosplay at Halloween, you know, just put on some headphones and you know, a nice woolen cardigan or jumper or something.

SPEAKER_02 17:08

Well, I actually took uh my favorite uh cardigan from that. I have it. So, you know, that's a free Halloween costume for me.

SPEAKER_01 17:16

It all suited you. It looked good. Uh before we wrap up, are there other things that you want to do? Have you done musicals or can you sing? Is that something that you'd look look at in the future, maybe?

SPEAKER_02 17:27

Um, not musicals. I want to do more. I did an army movie that was at TIFF last year where I played Canada's first female infantry officer, and I would love to do more physical roles like that. I I really enjoyed that. So um I'm looking forward to something like that.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

I was thinking that Undertone is a good title, but there's a line that you say to your mom in it about uh Hail Mary. So, you know, this movie could almost be called Project Hail Mary, maybe as an alternative title.

SPEAKER_02 17:56

You know what? I love that.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

Just me thinking outside the box, which is a bit silly.

SPEAKER_02 18:02

Yeah, just me thinking of the biggest grossing movie right now.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

And I was also thinking with undertone, it would have worked really well as black and white. I don't know about what you thought, but maybe even just certain parts of it. But I think in black and white it would have been just as cool too.

SPEAKER_02 18:16

That's interesting. Um, I think it would have worked really well in black and white. Um, I think the black and white would have also added to the claustrophobia of one space with one person. So that's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Well, um, I want to just say thank you, but in you know, to wrap it up in your final words, what how would you describe Undertone if people were thinking of watching it? Uh it's opening in Australia Cinemas next next week, or if they miss it in cinemas on streaming, when you know what in your own words, how would you describe it?

SPEAKER_02 18:48

I would describe it as internally haunting.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

Yeah, it's untraditional too.

SPEAKER_02 18:54

As a what?

SPEAKER_01 18:55

As very untraditional haunting.

SPEAKER_02 18:58

It is untraditional, and it's the type of a movie like I had a nightmare when I first watched it at Fantasia last summer. I didn't expect that at all. I was thinking, well, like I'm gonna watch this movie. I'm in, I know every scene, so it's obviously not gonna scare me, but it's the the movie isn't about what happens on screen. Um, the thing that makes this movie so um, I think why people have really resonated with it and why it's done as well as it has, is it does something that's kind of un you can't you can't manufacture this, but it affects people uh internally and really haunts them and creeps them out. Um, yeah, so I watched it and I was like, oh great, okay, you know, there's that's me and I'm watching it and I know what happens, and great, the movie's fine. And we left the theater and I just felt like impeding doom, and we were celebrating because we were at Fantasia. And then um, I said bye to everybody, we went to a bar and went home, and I had a nightmare at my hotel room.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

Oh no.

SPEAKER_02 19:58

And I'm like, I I don't have nightmares like at all, really. So that is the thing about this movie that I think intrigues people is there's there's a something you can't put your finger on that affects you, and that's not what happens on screen.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

Well, I I think uh Evangeline Evie goes to another dimension because the movie just stops without too much spoilers, it just stops, so there could be a continuation on where you go.

SPEAKER_02 20:27

I think there very well will be a second and third installment. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

Good to hear. Well, hopefully you'll make it down under to your you know, your family in Melbourne sometime. Your career, like I said, is fantastic. You're really soaring. I've got to say thank you for your time. Uh you you've worked with Jesse Buckley and and the great Yvonne Strahovsky. So that's pretty good. Good company.

SPEAKER_02 20:49

It is pretty good, yeah. Uh thank you. Again, I'm gonna I'm gonna hold that tidbit in my ear for uh for a rainy day. So I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

You're welcome. Well, take care and have a great Easter. Be safe.

SPEAKER_02 21:02

Thank you. Bye. Bye.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

Well, well, well, how about that? It was pretty cool. Uh great to talk to Nina Kiery all about Undertone. I hope you've got a chance to see it. Uh having said a few minor spoilers in our discussion there. Eternally haunting is what she described it as. And I think that is a pretty fair description. Oh, yes, a little bit of the undertone music there. Well, uh you can find me at movie underscore analyst, you can find my YouTube channel at movie analyst Shane Adam Bassett, hear me on the radio, occasionally see me on TV. And I'll see you at the movies then. Thank you for tuning in to another edition of Cine Critique.