A group of young adults fight to survive the night, again and again, in Until Dawn, a new horror film based on the 2015 PlayStation video game opening in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. Despite an innovative premise, solid effects work, and standout scenes of terror from director David F. Sandberg (Annabelle: Creation), this one devolves into an unusually tedious sit that is unlikely to satisfy fans of the game or general horror audiences.
Until Dawn stars Ella Rubin as Clover, who retraces the steps of her sister Melanie (Maia Mitchell) on a backwoods road trip a year after her tragic disappearance. Along for the ride are longtime friends Max (Michael Cimino, no relation to the director), Megan (Ji-young Yoo), Nina (Odessa A’zion), and Nina’s new boyfriend Abel (Belmont Cameli).
At the location of Melanie’s last known photo, they meet a creepy gas station attendant played by Peter Stormare (who also starred in the game), who warns them against traveling to the dangerous Glore Valley. They proceed, of course, and escape a violent storm by stopping at a deserted lodge, where they are gruesomely killed off one-by-one by a mad slasher wearing a broken doll’s mask.
Or are they? That’s the boilerplate setup for most slasher films of this type, dating all the way back to the original Friday the 13th, but it’s only the first fifteen minutes of Until Dawn. After the final character is killed off, they all suddenly ‘wake up’ just as they arrive at the lodge, with memories of being stalked and killed intact and a little worse for wear.
“It’s like that movie,” Max says, probably referring to Happy Death Day, or maybe Palm Springs, or even the father of these types of things, Groundhog Day. But as they notice changes to their surroundings and are stalked and killed by a different, more supernatural, presence the next time around, they find out that’s it is not really like that. But mostly.
The characters eventually work out that they need to survive the night, and they’ll get about 13 chances based on previous entries in the lodge’s guest book. And, they theorize (the rules are never quite clear), they all need to survive—if only one or two make it out alive, the rest of them won’t get another chance, and will eventually become part of this horror world.
The narrative of the original PS3 game was a direct adaptation of the usual slasher movie tropes, but gave players the opportunity to take control of each of its characters and try to get them to survive the night. The choices you make as each of them determine not only that character’s survival, but can also affect what happens to each of the others.
There’s no easy way to adapt that mechanic into a film, but Until Dawn‘s screenplay, by Gary Dauberman (Salem’s Lot) and Blair Butler (The Invitation), does so in an interesting way. The characters in the film are ultimately out to get the best ending—everyone’s survival—and they begin to kill themselves, and reset the “game”, in order to save their friends.
Unfortunately, that premise is where anything interesting in Until Dawn ends. You expect these characters to hunt around for clues and devise some kind of plan—nope. They just run around and get killed. And sit around and get killed. And while the gore effects are first-rate, we are just watching these characters get killed over and over again with little rooting interest in their survival, and nothing in the screenplay to prop up this series of deaths.
There’s an appropriate sense of terror to the deaths in most horror films that gets replaced by tedium in Until Dawn. By the 13th night, the characters are still arguing about what to do, and end up running around in the dark for one final time. If possible, we might care even less about their survival this time around. Director Sandberg is able to stage some impressive scenes of horror, including one climactic one that plays off the theme in his Lights Out. But he lacks a screenplay that would get us to care about whether these characters live or die.
Until Dawn is the third theatrical video game adaptation from PlayStation Productions after Gran Turismo and Uncharted; the studio also has TV adaptations of The Last of Us and Twisted Metal under its belt. Despite solid handling from director Sandberg, this one feels a lot less polished than those efforts, and the resulting film is more in line with last year’s The Strangers: Chapter 1.
The success of A Minecraft Movie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie suggests that there’s a lot of box office bank to be made from video game adaptations. Until Dawn will not be the next megahit, but should turn a tidy profit from its shoestring budget of $15 million. Still, one wishes the studio took more care with its IP. For almost all audiences, playing the game (recently released in a remastered version for PS5) for the first time or the fifteenth is a better alternative than making the trek out to the cinema to catch this adaptation.
