I recently sat down to watch the live-action adaptation of Supermassive Games’ gripping cinematic horror title, Until Dawn. Coming from Lights Out director David F. Sandberg, I had high hopes that the fantastic source material would be done justice. After all, given the game’s cinematic nature, surely not much needed to be changed to land a hit. Then the trailers came out and I got suspicious. The movie boasts a cool concept that seems fun on paper but ultimately, it’s all wasted potential.
Unlike the video game source material, the Until Dawn movie tells its own story about a group of people who venture to a creepy isolated house. Our lead, Clover (Ella Rubin) is looking for her missing sister who disappeared around the area. Soon after the group arrives, strange things start happening. They’re all quickly killed off by a deranged clown-masked murderer but instead of dying, they reawaken that same night in a kind of Groundhog Day time loop. The objective now is to ensure everyone survives, well, until dawn.
There will be spoilers discussed from this point onwards.The movie puts a great spin on the time loop concept by changing the horrors that the group encounters every time they reset the night. While on the first night, they could’ve been attacked by a killer, the next reset night, they have to deal with a supernatural attack by a witch. Sure, it’s going for that meta-horror vibe like The Cabin in the Woods, but on paper, there was potential here to really elevate the source material and appropriately turn the movie adaptation into its own beast.
The execution? Not so great. For the first half of the movie, it seems to have good momentum as the inventiveness of the scares escalate and the tension twists like a knife. One particular scene in a bathroom has the group drinking water, only to find out that the water causes their bodies to violently explode. Up until this point, the Until Dawn movie had me sold on its premise. It was fun with the right dosage of horror, intrigue and mystery.
Then the movie abruptly stomps on the brakes as we jump into the group’s “final” night to get the time loop right, or else they’ll transform into wendigos. We get a video montage of short clips that one of them recorded on their phone during the nights we didn’t get to see or experience – and I really wish we did because they all looked very creepy, unsettling and cool. By the time the movie snapped back to the “final” night, I was begging for it to go back to what we just saw. You know, the creatively entertaining movie we could’ve had.
The second half of the Until Dawn movie loses all of its air like a balloon deflating into a sad whimper. While I was watching the group trying to survive their last night, I kept wondering what went so wrong that the movie had to suddenly abandon the one great idea it had going for it. It doesn’t help that the movie is roughly 90-minutes long since it feels like it’s over before it ever has a chance to actually properly develop and build on its premise. We get the cliffnotes version of a Groundhog Day horror movie that tries to bite off more than it can chew.
Combining horror with a time loop isn’t exactly new. 2017’s Happy Death Day already did it considerably better than Until Dawn. However, the killer stayed the same in Happy Death Day while Until Dawn’s random assortment of horrors changed every night. If it were only a bit longer and had better writing, I think we could’ve been looking at a new horror classic. Sadly, it was mishandled and left in the hands of filmmakers who didn’t understand their own assignment.
The flaws that bring Until Dawn down extend to its cast and fan-service as well. All of its characters are disposable (which is ironic considering the video game) and forgettable; there’s no effort to flesh them out so they’re merely cannon fodder to die at the hands of whatever scary occurence takes place next. Peter Stormare, who actually appeared in the game, reprises his role as Dr. Hill, only the writers completely misuse the character as a villain whose motivation or reasoning is never clearly spelled out beyond some psychotic rambling.
There are some tie-ins to the video game that make even less sense than Dr. Hill. At one point, we get a brief glimpse of a patient file on the doctor’s desk that shows Rami Malek’s Joshua. The movie ends with Dr. Hill driving up to the snowy cabin from the video game, implying that the movie was a prequel? I don’t get it and I don’t think I ever will because the movie itself doesn’t even know what it wants to be.
The Until Dawn movie laid the foundation for a solid carnival of meta-horrors that would’ve been this generation’s Scream or The Cabin in the Woods. It’s just sad that it never reaches its full potential, either because it wasn’t backed by a better script and/or the filmmakers just gave up halfway through. It’s nothing like the video game – and I usually champion adaptations that try to detach from the source material to tell their own stories in their respective universes (see Prime Video’s Fallout) – but in this case, the game is already pre-cooked as a better movie already.
