Not that it makes much of a difference, but I now find myself having seen two cinematic adaptations of video games I have not played before within the same month. Fortunately, while A Minecraft Movie has made huge profits by drafting off Jack Black’s energy and enough moments for fans to point to in recognition (and little else), Until Dawn takes what seems like an interesting enough game and applies some clever means to make it function as an effective feature film. Rising to the challenge of what time loop moves have to offer, there’s a lot of gory fun to be had with a move that freely kills off its main cast over and over again. Fortunately, it also feels like a film that enjoys the genre it is a part of while finding enough balance in how to make this mean something for the characters involved.
The story follows Clover (Ella Rubin) and her friends Max (Michael Cimino), Nina (Odessa A’zion), Megan (Ji-young Yoo), and Abel (Belmont Cameli), who have traveled to a remote valley in search of Clover’s sister Melanie (Maia Mitchell), who disappeared a year ago. Arriving at a large but seemingly abandoned house (which goes strangely unaffected by the heavy weather surrounding it), the group soon finds themselves in a terrible situation. As it turns out, they’ve become caught in an endless time loop, where various forms of evil horrifically murder all of them every night, only for them to wake up back at the beginning of the evening, attempting to survive again. Perhaps if they survive until dawn, something could change, but it will undoubtedly be a challenge.
This film is directed by David F. Sandberg, who recently found himself in big-budget territory, having helmed the two Shazam films, but he started out with horror. While arriving on the scene with Lights Out, followed by Annabelle: Creation (my favorite Conjuring universe movie), Sandberg and his wife/producer Lotta Losten had crafted many horror shorts using clever tricks and other DIY methods to deliver the goods with limited means. While Until Dawn has a decent-sized budget to work with what’s needed for a PlayStation game adaptation, I’d like to think Sandberg kept that inventive spirit in mind with this film.
It’s one thing to get the latest iteration of zombie-like monsters or creepy characters in masks slowly dismembering people, but the version of that type of horror presented here can go a long way when the filmmakers involved give the audience more to chew on, whether it comes down to how the characters react, the geography of our central locations, or simply the design choices involved. Some of the main villains in this film do have more or less scary makeup/costume designs that add to their intensity, but the nature of this story also means having a stronger-than-average reason for accepting them as a near-unstoppable force.
Thankfully, the script by Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler doesn’t try too hard to delve into how time loops work. Instead, there’s more of an insistence on trial and error within the group. That can be fun, almost too much when considering why they’re there, what they’re experiencing, and, I suppose, the existential nature of living out life through death on repeat. However, the rules and limits are applied in a simple enough manner, allowing the film to construct other ways to deal with the situation, as far as the audience’s perspective is concerned.
Having a variety of horror monsters as well as visual approaches means watching Sandberg and his team flex their scary movie muscles and combine a variety of sub-genres into what amounts to a funhouse of gory gags. While various forms of bodies, limbs, or heads becoming disassembled in some way is frequently entertaining (y’know, for a horror movie), this very R-rated movie jumps at the chance to get really messy once it’s established that sometimes people just want to see a body pop. If anything, a late-in-the-film montage that puts on display even more forms of malevolence makes me wish we got a bit more of a taste of the wild creations developed for this film, but that’s not to say Until Dawn ever really comes up short.
For a film like this, I’m not exactly looking at the individual performances to find ways to form even more praise, but I will say the cast is solid. It’s a pretty group of young people with the right kind of chemistry. I’m glad none of them fall too easily into types, and instead just feel like people who hang out with each other. Rubin, who is ostensibly the lead character, does enough work to justify Clover’s plight regarding finding her missing sister. It’s enough to let me know I did care, to some extent, about the overriding story, beyond just the steps that need to be taken for setting up additional kills, let alone whatever questions/hopes I had about how they actually get out of their predicament.
Without being equipped to engage with this film in terms of source fidelity, I will say I had a fun time with Until Dawn on the terms with which it established itself. Time loop films always imply a certain level of ambition, given all of the moving pieces a filmmaker has to keep track of, which involves both making an initial setup engaging yet having to keep up a certain momentum. In the case of this film, the intrigue is there, but it is supplemented well with the high levels of horror violence, and gore. Rather than shy away from the grisly good stuff, we have a film full-on embracing the imagination of a deranged former horror shorts filmmaker, and I mean that in the best of ways. I was happy staying up for Until Dawn.
Until Dawn arrives in theaters on April 25, 2025.
