Until Dawn, developed by Supermassive Games on the PS4, is a beloved game that displays its inspirations happily: those 80s and 90s horror flicks that we all loved, usually depicting a group of hapless teenagers in sticky situations. We’re talking about Halloween, Friday the 13th, Scream and other such classics. They’re all kinda schlocky, and that’s what I loved about them. And that’s what I love about Until Dawn.
But what happens when you loosely adapt a movie from a video game that is loosely adapted from those films from thirty or forty years ago? Well, you get Until Dawn, the new movie from David F. Sandberg and starring Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino and the wonderful Peter Stormare.
I did, however, say it was loosely adapted from the game. And, although that isn’t a deal breaker when it’s done right, this was very much done wrong.
Clover (Ella Rubin) is on a road trip with her friends, retracing the last journey her sister took before she went missing. She’s a troubled girl, but that doesn’t abate her ex-boyfriend Max’s (Michael Cimino) feelings for her. Her other friends, Nina, Abe and empath Megan are over her sh*t and are glad they’re at their last stop in the grief tour. That’s until Clover gets a lead from a creepy gas station attendant (Peter Stormare) that takes them to an eerie welcome center in the middle of nowhere.
That’s where the fun begins.
The group are brutally murdered to death by a psycho in a mask, one by one. You might think this is a spoiler, but it’s not. This is the plot. The night resets, and they begin again, but this time with a different threat trying to kill them. Will the group continue to die until they can no longer live, or are they able to survive UNTIL DAWN?
Yup. They said the name of the movie.
Peter Stormare is the best thing in this film. He has the gravitas you need from a harbinger: sinister, vague, and authoritative. Clover should have in no way trusted this creepy guy she just met, but she did, and that’s pretty dumb. But Stormare is perfect in this role and gives a great performance when he shows up later in the film.
There were some good deaths in Until Dawn. Some gross stabby stabs through eyes, surprising moments and even some spontaneous combustion. There is even a little montage seen through phone recordings, which is cool. Unfortunately, the trailer spoiled most of these events, but they were still good.
For the first two rounds of deaths, although I knew it didn’t mean much because they’d be resetting the night again, I felt the crescendo of tension in the right places. They did a good job with the psycho stalker, making its movements slow and deliberate enough to make it scary. The danger the teens were in could be felt through the screen.
But that dissipated again when I remembered the night would just reset.
The problem with the concept of dying over and over again is the desensitization to it. It’s a problem Happy Death Day would have had if it hadn’t leaned into the comedy-horror genre. Until Dawn is NOT a comedy in any way. There are funny moments, but I’m not sure they’re supposed to be. The tone is way too serious for this plot.
The other problem is that the teens are mostly annoying, and I didn’t really care whether they lived or died. Abe is the worst, Max is an obsessed puppy dog, and Clover is whiny and wayyyyyyyyy too quick to ask people to kill her if things aren’t going her way. Nina and Megan are the ones I gravitated to the most, but I watched this film two days ago, and I’m not gonna lie, I’d already forgotten their names.
Lastly, I don’t think the plot or the resolution actually makes sense. It doesn’t explain why there’s a time loop. It doesn’t explain where all these monsters (except one subset) come from. It doesn’t explain how the teens get trapped in the welcome center. It’s like one of the writers just said, “let’s hand-wave everything with a supernatural wand and we won’t have to resolve any of that.” It feels lazy.
It’s not the game.
The story has some nods to the PlayStation game of the same name, but the concept isn’t anywhere near. That was a tight monster story where all of your choices, whether it be dialogue, movements or lack thereof, or what you pick up and take with you on your journey, had consequences. There were multiple different endings based on how you tackled each challenge, sometimes causing deaths in your party.
Until Dawn is a teen slasher horror and a sort of time loop film, but it’s not even a proper time loop because the dangers change every night. It has basically nothing to do with the game, save for maybe a monster type or two, and Peter Stormare, who is the only member of the original cast to make an appearance, but not necessarily in the same role.
This film isn’t an adaptation. It’s just a movie with the same name.
Until Dawn is not a video game adaptation; it’s a film that shares a name with a video game. Now that’s out of the way, we can talk about how successful this film is independently from the source material.
It isn’t.
After the first couple of deaths, there was little to no tension, and Until Dawn wasn’t played for laughs. It was a full-ass drama that wanted people on the edge of their seats, but the time-loop aspect desensitizes you very quickly. Worse still, I rarely cared whether our heroes lived or died because the teens were either forgettable or just annoying.
It’s not all bad, with some gnarly death scenes and a great performance from the ever-wonderful Peter Stormare, but I exited the cinema severely underwhelmed. A character change here and a shift to a comedy-horror tone may have saved this film, but as it is, it did not work.
I guess that’s what you get when you loosely adapt something loosely adapted from another work. It’s just a hodge-podge of nothing.
Peter Stormare makes everything better. I wonder if this just came out unattached to the game if it would have had more room to find itself and be something cool.