By Keith Walther | Rose Law Group Reporter
While the premise has potential, a number of issues and poor execution prevent this film from meeting that potential. “Until Dawn” is a slasher horror film based on the video game of the same name and like many other video game adaptations, it simply fails to deliver entertainment on the big screen. The storyline takes great liberty with the source material, making fans of the game hate it and newcomers dislike it.
Retracing her sister’s final journey before her disappearance a year earlier, Clover (Ella Rubin) and her friends, Max (Michael Cimino), Nina (Odessa A’zion), Megan (Ji-young Yoo), and Abe (Belmont Cameli), find themselves in a remote area called Glore Valley. The weather isn’t the only strange phenomenon in this area. The only building is an abandoned welcome center, where the group inadvertently stumbles into a nightmarish time loop.
Each night they endure gruesome deaths at the hands of some malevolent supernatural force, only to be resurrected at the beginning of the same night to relive different horrors. They must simply survive until dawn to break the deadly curse, but they only get 13 tries before they become a part of the night permanently.
As the film itself admits, the time loop scenario has been done many times in film, and even in the horror genre like with the “Happy Death Day” flicks. Director David F. Sandberg takes a crack at it and with his horror experience helming films like “Lights Out” and “Annabelle: Creation,” he should have been able to succeed bringing the video game to life. Unfortunately, Sandberg chooses a different story with forced references from the game rather than a direct adaptation, angering fans for titling it “Until Dawn” before the movie even begins, since it truly doesn’t represent that media. This approach on originality would have been fine for those unfamiliar with the game, or those simply looking for a decent horror film, but then he makes a series of costly errors that erode the film’s quality.
It’s almost as if Sandberg realizes midway through shooting that 13 nights worth of mutilating the main characters are too much. Each night of murderous mayhem is supposed to yield clues that help the group get closer to the truth, hence potential survival, which they’re allowed to remember with each resurrection. Suddenly, this premise and rules of the time loop are completely abandoned as the characters wake up befuddled on night 13, skipping multiple nights, only having a montage of video recordings that one of the characters just so happened to film on their phone as their only source of memory as to what occurred on those missing nights. While it is understandable Sandberg chose to do this, since the nightly death scenes were becoming tedious, this is a lazy approach to fast forward to the end. This effectively shortchanges the lore and explanations of how/why this is happening, jumping to conclusions that are baffling and farfetched.
David F. Sandberg deserves some credit for preferring to use practical visual effects for most of the film, rather than CGI. These effects and set pieces are very well done with frightening imagery of the monsters that raise the hairs on the back of the neck. He’s also able to generate some truly suspenseful moments in the movie, particularly towards the end as time is running out. However, he breaks the most important rule for crafting a terrifying film, and that’s developing the characters. Without having three dimensional characters for the audience to be invested in, it undermines the suspense and horror, because viewers could care less about what happens to them. Add to that a lack of attention to detail, follow-up, and closure of subplots, and the production becomes a disappointing mess.
The cast is unassuming and largely forgettable, led by Ella Rubin, whose work in last year’s Oscar decorated film “Anora” does not translate to success here. She has a complete lack of screen presence with zero emotional impact, making for a drab performance. To use video game terminology, the lack of depth these actors provide in their roles make them appear as NPC’s (non-playable characters), which are basically soulless husks. The clunky dialogue writing does not help any of them overcome these deficiencies.
Despite some decent thrills and scary visuals, “Until Dawn” features too many errors, plot holes, and sloppy execution, making it unsuitable to watch at any time of day. This is yet another video game adaptation you’ll want to avoid, especially fans of this game. It may have worked significantly better as a TV series, like “The Last of Us.”
This movie earns:
