Amusia, commonly known as tone deafness, is a musical disorder that appears mainly as a defect in processing pitch but also encompasses musical memory and recognition. Two main classifications of amusia exist, acquired amusia, which occurs as a result of brain damage, and congenital amusia, which results from a music-processing anomaly present since birth.
Writer and director Richard Bates Jr. has chosen this disease as the name of his newest film, Tone-Deaf (2019), a horror thriller with some doses of dark humor about a woman goes to the countryside to spend a quiet weekend after she is having some bad times but her plans go south when she has to deal with the mad man owner of the house.
Tone-Deaf (2019) is the fourth feature film written and directed by Richard Bates Jr. after the awarded Excision (2012), Suburban Gothic (2014) and Trash Fire (2016). It is starred by Robert Patrick, Amanda Crew, Kim Delaney, Hayley Marie-Norman, Ray Wise, Johnny Pemberton, Keisha Castle-Hughes, AnnaLynne McCord, Nelson Franklin, and Ronnie Gene-Blevins.
The official plot of Tone-Deaf (2019) reads: After losing her job and imploding her latest dysfunctional relationship, millennial Olive leaves the city for a weekend of peace in the country, only to discover the shockingly dark underbelly of rural America. She rents an eccentric, ornate country house from Harvey, an old-fashioned widower who’s struggling to hide his psychopathic tendencies. Soon two generations collide with terrifying results in this home invasion horror film that is also a darkly comedic critique of the bizarre cultural and political climate that currently exists.
This weekend the movie will have its worldwide premiere at South by Southwest Film Festival, and it is considered one of the main courses of this year’s line-up. You can check out more information about the movie, the festival and the screenings at the official festival’s site here.
