Because there’s no better way to bring in the spooky season than with a shitty horror movie.
Until Dawn is loosely based on the 2015 game from Supermassive Games, a company widely known for delivering horror games with elaborate branching narratives and Hollywood-level spectacle. In point of fact, the first game (it eventually became a series, natch) was effectively a ten-hour interactive movie starring the likes of Rami Malek, Hayden Panettiere, Brett Dalton, and Peter Stormare. Naturally, given the nature and success of the game and Sony’s desperation for a viable non-Marvel cinematic franchise (How did Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire work out for ya, Tommy boy?), a film adaptation was pretty much immediately set in development.
The immediate problem with adapting the game was obvious: They were working with a game that was already made and marketed as an interactive movie. Thus a movie without the interactive element could only be a step backward. To resolve this, the filmmakers came up with the brilliant idea of making the film a standalone spinoff that took place in the same continuity as the games. Unfortunately, there was a major drawback: The filmmakers who got that brilliant idea.
The script is attributed to Blair Butler, who started out in video games journalism before writing the progressively disappointing scripts to Hell Fest, Polaroid, and The Invitation. She handed the script off to co-writer Gary Dauberman, an architect of the monumental failure that was the Conjuring Universe. Worst of all, we got David F. Sandberg in the director’s chair. Yes, he made the awesome Shazam!, but he also made that movie’s sequel. And before that, he made Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation.
Sandberg made two pitifully mediocre horror movies… and now he’s going back to horror. At this point, I’m convinced that the Sony execs are only shooting themselves in the foot because they’re aiming for the head.
Anyway, stop me if you’ve heard this one before. We open with a teen girl who gets killed by some generic monster. We then cut to the girl’s sister and her four best friends, all of whom are trying to find the initial victim. They go to a remote cabin where they have to fight for their lives against a monstrous evil.
The characters and the premise are all pathetically generic. There is no personality, no charm, no development arc, and nothing to distinguish one character from other. We’ve got Clover (Ella Rubin), the sister who’s the designated protagonist; and Megan (Ji-young Yoo) who has inconsistent psychic abilities. Oh, and there’s Peter Stormare (reprising the enigmatic Dr. Alan Hill from the games) as our creepy enigmatic old guy. That’s pretty much it.
Literally the only thing this movie has going for it is the time loop gimmick. Yes, our hapless victim pool is stuck reliving the same night over and over again, restarting the loop every time they die. And they only get 13 tries to make it to dawn.
It could’ve been a neat gimmick. Nothing to do with the game’s lore, of course, but it’s a clever adaptation of restarting the game to try a different branching path. Too bad there are so many reasons why it doesn’t work here.
First of all, it bears repeating that the characters have virtually zero development arc. Because they have no personalities or distinguishing features between each other, there’s basically nothing to distinguish how the characters are different or more developed for surviving another loop. The film hints at going there, as the characters remember who killed whom and who left whom to die, but nobody ever actually does anything with it.
A central feature of the time loop trope is that the characters learn and grow from their past mistakes with each iteration. Not here. This movie makes a clear and explicit point of throwing some radically new and different threat at the characters with each new repetition. Which means there’s zero chance for the victim pool to learn or adapt or grow stronger. There’s none of the setup/payoff that comes with a repeating night. FAIL.
What’s even worse, this time loop mechanic drains all suspense or horror out of the film. Granted, the director already did that — as proven by his last two horror movies, Sandberg only has “obnoxious jump scares” in his bag of tricks. But more than that, the characters know just as well as we do that if they die, they’ll come right back just as clueless and incapable of defending themselves, ready to die again. There’s nothing at stake here.
Yes, I know there are stated consequences for dying the full 13 times and we get some bare-minimum makeup effects to show those encroaching consequences. It doesn’t matter. It’s not a handicap or a benefit to the characters’ abilities and it doesn’t change how they act or think in any direct way, so the consequences might as well be nonexistent.
The worldbuilding here is putrid trash. You want an explanation for the time loop and what makes the cabin special? You want to know the antagonists’ motivation? You want to know how and why all these bugfuck random threats pop up out of nowhere? All of these explanations are either blithering nonsense, pathetically thin, or outright nonexistent.
So is there anything here that might’ve been salvaged? Well, we do get one scene that explicitly reframes the basic premise as a metaphor: Stay where you are and play it safe, and you die. Charge forward and make an effort, at least you show some courage in the process of dying. Death is a given either way, it’s what we do with the time we have that makes a difference.
It’s a sweet little moral that works surprisingly well with the time loop gimmick. Too bad the film’s other themes about trauma and suicide fall flat on the floor. And again, none of this is enough to compensate for the lack of stakes, motivation, tension, personality, or any other reason to give a shit about what’s happening.
Until Dawn commits the worst possible sin of horror cinema: It’s boring. The jump scares aren’t scary, the characters aren’t interesting, the premise is threadbare, the gimmick is pathetically mishandled, the worldbuilding is godawful, and the antagonist is randomized nonsense.
There’s just enough effort and sincerity to keep this from being offensively bad, memorably bad, or enjoyably bad. No, this is just plain bad. This is duller than dogshit. Just like Sandberg’s other horror films, it’s the kind of bad that nobody will learn from because nobody will remember it ever existed in another three months. Bad, bad, bad.