Until Dawn – Movie Review (2/5)

UNTIL DAWN is a new survival horror movie with something that feels like a time loop story, but it isn’t actually. While I feel it was too long, it’s still worth watching. Once is enough, though. Read our full Until Dawn horror movie review here!

UNTIL DAWN is a horror movie out on digital now. It’s a survival horror movie where the characters have to relive the same night over and over again. Which means they also have to die over and over again.

Obviously, this leads to some repetitiveness, but also some very creative death scenes. There’s a time loop feel to the story (which is actually highlighted by dialogue in the movie, which was a huge plus), but they do keep moving forward in time. Sadly, it is too long.

Continue reading our Until Dawn horror movie review below. Find it on PVOD now.

Survive the night to move on

The reason Until Dawn has a very time-loopy feel is that the characters have to survive the night before they can move on. Until they manage to survive until dawn (hence the title), they will have to start over again and again.

Not unlike a video game, where you have to pass a certain obstacle to move forward in the game.

With Until Dawn, we meet a group of friends helping one in the group to look for her sister. We see the missing sister, Melanie (Maia Mitchell), briefly in the opening scene, and then move one year into the future.

This is where her sister Clover (Ella Rubin) and her friends have followed Melanie’s tracks and are now heading into the remote valley where she vanished. Everything about this place screams iconic horror movies.

It’s something straight out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and it’s obvious they’re about to walk into trouble. Yet they persist, and once they reach an abandoned visitor center, a masked killer starts hunting them down.

While they are murdered, they still wake up to face the killer again. Based on how many times previous guests (including Clover’s sister) have managed to sign the guest book, they’re realizing that they “only” have a certain number of “lives” to pass this test.

Will they all make it?!

Solid core plot based on a video game

While I enjoyed the core plot of Until Dawn, I do feel they could’ve spent a little more time developing the characters. I know this horror movie is based on a video game, but that doesn’t change anything for me.

In fact, it’s the opposite. When doing a movie adaptation of a video game, you have every chance to develop and focus on the characters. We’ve seen this done successfully (to a point, anyway) with Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, and especially, The Last of Us series.

As someone who adores David F. Sandberg (and particularly his partnership with Lotta Losten, his wife), I loved much of the execution. As in the wildly murderous scenes throughout – and the cameos of both Sandberg and Losten – but the story was too light.

Watch Until Dawn on digital now!

Director David F. Sandberg clearly had a blast making this movie. He is like a kid in a candy store when he gets to play with horror in the classic slasher way. And I like what I see. I just don’t get the feeling I want from my survival horror movie.

This is due to the story, which I know is based on a video game, but I need to care more about these characters. Apart from them constantly referring to each other as family, I don’t get the feeling that this is more than a figure of speech. Also, one of them has been in the group for a few months, as the boyfriend of someone in the group, so that doesn’t work.

The screenplay comes from Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler. Previously, Gary Dauberman wrote Annabelle Comes Home, It, and Salem’s Lot, and Blair Butler wrote Hell Fest and The Invitation. We should have been able to get deeper characters with better connections from them.

For me, the actors all deliver, so I can’t blame them. And cool to have Peter Stormare (Day Shift) who voiced the character in the video game as well, in the movie adaptation. Still, it’s not enough to really thrill me.

Do check it out, but just don’t expect that you’ll need to watch it more than once. I certainly don’t plan to.

Until Dawn is out on VOD.

Details

Director: David F. Sandberg
Writers: Blair Butler, Gary Dauberman
Cast: Ella Rubin, ​Michael Cimino, ​Odessa A’zion, ​Ji-young Yoo, ​Belmont Cameli, ​Maia Mitchell, ​Peter Stormare