Sony has been busy trying to get some of its popular video game franchises to make the leap to a different form of entertainment. HBO had a successful TV show with The Last of Us—at least, it was successful for the first season. The second season made a mistake by following the source material of The Last of Us Part 2 too closely. Normally, following source material would be a good thing, but everyone who knew anything about the games (except for the writer Neil Druckman, who was responsible for the storytelling feux pax) knew that it was going to be a catastrophe if they stuck to Part 2’s story. Ratings plummeted after a certain scene involving a golf club, and now there may not be a third season. It’s a good thing Sony’s got other Cinematic franchises to choose from that they can turn into a show or movie…Oh, they chose Until Dawn…

For those who don’t know, Until Dawn was originally a video game for the PlayStation 4 developed by Supermassive Games. It was praised for the (at the time) realistic rendering of the faces of various actors, including Remi Malek and Peter Storemare. It was a horror game in which you would jump from the perspective of one character to another throughout the story. The characters are all college-age morons who would normally be the victims of someone like Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th movies. They’re staying at a secluded cabin in the woods where spooky stuff happens involving a masked “psycho,” a man hunting in the woods with a flamethrower, and a supernatural creature known as the wendigo.

I watched some people play the game on YouTube when it came out, rather than play it for myself, because I knew I would hate the experience. I didn’t like the design decisions that were filled with false choices in which players were supposed to be making drastic changes to the story, when most changes were extremely minor. There were only a few instances in which a decision (you had no way of knowing the result at the time) would cause a character to die. Even then, the overall experience would not change much by the end. It didn’t help that all the characters were completely unlikable assh*les who seemed to all hate each other, despite claiming that they were all close friends. It’s counterintuitive to make the goal of the game to save everyone from the dangers of the night when you make them all so unpleasant that you want them to die. With a movie, you at least remove the player’s choice in the matter, so the gaggle of goofballs who hate each other getting killed makes a little more sense in that medium.

Well, guess what? The movie does not copy the story of the game at all. In fact, there is barely a thing that the game and the movie have in common with each other, outside of the name and Peter Storemare.

Pros

Some gore effects look impressive
Set, costume, and makeup design work well
Decent jump scares
Less than two hours
Premise is interesting enough to make for an entertaining horror movie

Cons

Fails to capitalize on the interesting premise and makes it a disappointment
Characters are really dull and dumb
Contrived plot devices and inconsistencies abound
Plot is incoherent
Script is poorly written

Plot & Thoughts

Clover (Ella Rubin) is on a road trip with her friends, Megan (Ji-young Yoo), Nina (Odessa A’zion), Max (Michael Cimino), and Abe (Belmont Cameli). This isn’t a vacation, however, as she is looking for her sister, Melanie (Maia Mitchell), who went missing a year ago in this region of the country. After getting details about the area from the harbinger of doom, aka the gas-station manager (Peter Storemare), the gang heads towards Glore Valley in search of Melanie. Upon arriving at an abandoned visitor center, however, some spooky things start to happen. Then, a masked killer shows up and starts murdering them. It seems like the shortest movie ever about these characters when they all die twenty minutes into the film, but then, suddenly, they’re all alive again at the moment that Nina writes her name down in the guest log, with vague memories of how they all died. They’ve gotten themselves stuck in a time loop in which creepy creatures, psycho killers, witches, and other spooky things are trying to kill them, and they must survive until dawn to break the curse or become a part of the nightmare forever.

The premise of a Groundhog Day time-loop situation in a horror movie is not a bad one; it was tried before with Happy Death Day. There’s a lot of fun you can have with it in terms of creating horrific moments, but also some comedic situations. Had Until Dawn stuck the landing with those situations, it would have been a fun and interesting time. Unfortunately, it fails at every turn and stumbles to every punch line, which makes the movie a significant disappointment.

One of the best segments in Groundhog Day is the montage of suicides that Phil (Bill Murray) commits when he’s given up on his life in the loop. He becomes jaded towards the idea of death because he’s died so many times. Until Dawn starts to get there, with certain characters beginning to care less about their own demise, but it never fully commits. There are a lot of ideas it takes from Groundhog Day, but then timidly avoids being too close to it, like a scene towards the end of the film that essentially acts as the montage of deaths to raise the stakes and speed up the final act. There’s even a line of dialogue where someone says, “Like in that movie,” suggesting that they’re all thinking about Groundhog Day. However, just like how Back to the Future being referenced in Avengers: Endgame did not fix the countless problems with the time travel mechanics, indirectly referencing the hilarious classic does not wave away the criticisms of Until Dawn.

If there’s one thing Until Dawn has in common with its source material, it’s that the characters suck. They’re all idiots, which we’ll get to, but they’re also just weird versions of human beings to the point that I’m not sure how I’m supposed to interpret their interactions sometimes. It feels like they were made up using an AI that doesn’t understand human behavior. I get the impression that Abe is the guy we’re supposed to dislike based on how the other characters react to things he says or does, but sometimes he’s the one with the most logical perspective. For instance, when they learn from the villain that there are certain rules to their situation, he says something somewhat reasonable about trying to get more information, and everyone ends up mad at him. I am not defending him because he sucks just as much as the rest of them, but I didn’t understand certain dialogue choices with him.

I know it’s a commonly accepted trope in horror movies, but do the characters need to be stupid? There are many, many instances in Until Dawn in which the characters do something irrationally dumb; sometimes they do it immediately after saying or doing something vaguely intelligent, for example, the scene in the bathroom. After multiple deaths, the group retreats to the bathroom of the visitor center, having barricaded all the entrances and exits. They’ve been sitting in that room for hours, debating what they’re going to do to escape this curse based on the new information Clover was given in the previous scene. Suddenly, one of them just gets up and fills a glass with water from the faucet, which is then passed around to each person in the group. We, as viewers who have more than two brain cells, know that something is going to happen now because of this character’s decision to go and grab a glass of water. We know this because this is a movie, and he’s suddenly thirsty for no apparent reason. Then, the camera makes sure to show each character taking a sip. It’s a sudden decision that feels forced in the scene, but it’s (surprisingly) necessary to the plot later on, which means the writers knew that they needed to establish the danger of the water but couldn’t come up with a situation that seemed natural. Of course, all of them die from this decision to drink the water, albeit with one of the film’s more impressive gore effects. Then the villain appears and says something along the lines of “you can’t win by doing nothing.” I’d sooner call him a liar, however, as the film shows the curse clock was just a few grains away from emptying, which then suggests that the group of idiots almost did survive until dawn by doing nothing. They just drank water a few minutes before they were free and died for it. If you die and come back immediately after that, recognizing that you almost made it to morning, would you not try the same thing again and just not drink the water this time?

There might be a reason the characters don’t try it again, aside from their lack of intellect. The movie suggests that there are certain rules to their nightmare. The villain, to whom the group knows is evil, exposits some of these, but they still seem to believe him anyway. In fact, he says a bunch of things that are obviously not true, but the movie presents them as though he’s being honest. The only thing that remains consistent is the concept that they’ll be free if they survive the night. The alternative of “becoming part of the nightmare” isn’t really made clear until the last act, when it suggests they can’t die more than a certain number of times to up the ante of their situation.

What appears in Glore Valley each night is also inconsistent. The masked killer is the first threat, but he seems to be lurking somewhere sometimes. There’s a giant in the distance, sometimes. The water always seems to be dangerous, except if they’re getting rained on. Sometimes there are wendigos, sometimes there’s just one or none. Sometimes there’s a random house with a witch in it. If all of them die, the night resets. That is, except in the final act, when one of them went missing from the group while the others died, and they all came back anyway. Essentially, I’m saying that the rules don’t matter, and when rules don’t matter, neither does the story.

The only areas of praise I can level at Until Dawn are the effects, the sets, and the overall length. At a little over 90 minutes, it doesn’t waste too much time getting to things, and it doesn’t waste much of yours. The various deaths are gory and gruesome a lot of the time, and they look much better than the last three Final Destination movies. Likewise, the setting, although much of it has the look of a sound stage, is appropriately spooky and well-decorated. Since most movies just shoot in front of greenscreens these days, it’s nice to see more practical backgrounds for the characters to inhabit.

TL;DR

Until Dawn has a premise that has been done before and better in other horror movies, but not many. It should have been able to capitalize on its premise to be an entertaining blend of horror and dark comedy. Instead, it’s a pretty-looking mess with dumb characters and inconsistent rules about how everything works. It’s under two hours, and the gore effects look good, but it’s still not worthy of a recommendation. They might have been better off just following the source material.

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