Until Dawn – Review

It wasn’t too long ago that video game adaptations were middling at best and a floundering disappointment at their worst, but recent successes stemming from this year’s A Minecraft Movie, the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise or The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) have demonstrated their inherent potential when done properly. 

Hoping to throw his hat in the ring, horror veteran David F. Sandberg (Annabelle: Creation, Lights Out) is making a return to the horror genre after his brief stint with the Shazam! movies for Until Dawn, based on Supermassive Games’ 2015 interactive drama survival horror title. On paper, the unique game, with branching narratives, has the makings of an engaging, intriguing adventure as its butterfly effect system, of actions having unintended consequences, had some decent worldbuilding and characterisation. 

But some things are better left to rot in the night and never see the light of day, especially in a landscape already oversaturated with game-to-movie adaptations. 

Set in the same universe as the game that inspired it, but taking extreme liberties with its narrative, the big-screen adaptation follows Clover (Ella Rubin, Fear Street: Prom Queen) and her four friends as they retrace the steps of her missing sister Melanie (Maia Mitchell, The Fosters). Their trail leads them to the abandoned Glore Valley, the last known location of Melanie since she vanished a year prior, and to a quaint yet creepy lodge that seems to be stuck in the past.

There, they receive the biggest clue to their missing friend’s whereabouts in the form of her name scribbled on a sign-in sheet, although it’s mysteriously written multiple times, getting more illegible with each entry. Night soon falls, leaving the quintet no time to process these strange occurrences as they are swiftly hunted down by a deranged masked individual, who brutally murders them one by one.

And roll credits? Except no, because for some reason, despite having the same “friends stuck in an abandoned lodge” premise, this movie introduces a time-loop plotline aka Groundhog Day, but a concept not seen in the games, as our heroes soon wake up and find themselves back at the beginning of the night, and are subsequently forced to relive the nightmare seemingly over and over again, but with a different creature killing them, where the only way to escape is surviving until dawn.

*Yawn*

This isn’t just a simple rinse-and-repeat, though, as each do-over introduces a new horror to overcome, from masked maniacs to witches and mutated monstrosities, turning the movie into a blend of horror character archetypes, of Happy Death Day and Thirteen Ghosts, and then combining a range of horror sub-genres including slashers, creature features and even a found footage segment. It’s all good gory fun, with some tension-inducing moments of deafening silence followed by somewhat predictable jump scares, alongside a healthy dose (not for our heroes, though) of violence, blood, and guts, all supplemented by its copious usage of practical effects for many a creative kill that’s consistently visceral and entertaining to witness.

This same creativity can’t be said of the film’s overarching narrative, which offers nothing more than an excuse to keep the beasts and scares coming. Even its main beat regarding Clover’s search for her missing sister falls short due to a lack of emotional development between the pair, largely boiling down to a single flashback scene that comes and goes without any payoff. 

The film’s supporting cast does no better either, with flat acting across the board, especially when each taps into an overused slasher archetype, such as the jock, Abel (Belmont Cameli, Saved by the Bell), and the stereotypically smart Asian Megan (Ji-young Yoo, Moxie), who’s also a psychic because why not. Along with Clover’s cheerleader-esque best friend Nina (Odessa A’zion, Hellraiser) and ex-boyfriend Max (Michael Cimino, Annabelle Comes Home), who doesn’t really serve any purpose other than being secretly in love with Clover despite their past breakup, it’s hard to find any character to root for amidst the chaos and messy writing. 

As the film’s only saving grace, Peter Stormare (Constantine, Prison Break) reprises his character of Alan J. Hill aka The Analyst, from the video game, pulling off a respectable job of exuding the same calm yet intimidating energy, so it’s a shame that he doesn’t appear much at all throughout the film’s one-hour-and-40-minute runtime. While the original game cast Hollywood well-knowns such as Hayden Panettiere (Heroes), Brett Dalton (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) or Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody), the adaptation’s decision to use attractive industry newcomers serves as a detriment to its overall lore telling and world building, as it goes for the teen segment.

If you can ignore the bland acting and focus on just the scares, the film does deliver a good time in terms of variety of deaths, but it still can’t escape its more glaring misstep – that it’s hardly an Until Dawn film. Aside from a couple of throwbacks to the source material, like the presence of Wendigos, the Psycho, or references to its characters and setting, it offers nothing to deserve the name, with the shift from interactive media to a linear format hurting the movie in many ways, most notably in its logic. 

Whereas the game initially presented an outlandish plot with its Wendigos, players could explore the gameworld to collect items revealing subtle plot elements to explain how they came to be, with the creature’s history rooted in Native American culture and folklore of a real-world tribe known as the Cree, this movie has none of that. Instead, it introduces a time loop element that is not only never fully explained but also presented in an extremely confusing manner. Exposition is crammed in up until the very last moment, but brilliantly fails to properly establish some sense in its plot. Essentially, it feels like the Until Dawn name was slapped on a preexisting time-loop horror idea purely for brand recognition, with no effort put into recreating the game’s complex themes and rich lore.

As a video game adaptation, it fails to pay proper respect to its roots, and despite offering an intriguing concept with its time-looping mechanic, it ends up being a redundant adaptation, especially since the original title was rooted in the premise of turning a passive movie-watching experience into an interactive one. Until Dawn serves as yet another warning that just because you can turn a popular gaming franchise into a film, doesn’t mean that you should.

If only we could go back in time to somehow stop them.

Kevin Low

Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.