Year of Release: 2025
Director: David F. Sandberg
Starring: Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A'zion, Ji-young Yoo, Belmont Cameli, Maia Mitchell, Peter Stormare, Lotta Losten, Tibor Szauervein, Willem van der Vegt
Score out of ten (whole numbers only): 4
Watch it on Amazon
Synopsis and Review
After the fizzle of "Shazam! Fury of the Gods", and some of the noise surrounding David F. Sandberg's reaction to the reviews (he didn't take the less than stellar reviews well), the director has returned to the genre who made him originally a household name (or at least well known). "Until Dawn" is derived from a video game with the same name and its script is authored by the talented Gary Dauberman (who adapted and directed the recent "Salem's Lot", but also authored the "Annabelle" films and the first chapter of "The Nun" series) and Blair Butler (she wrote "The Invitation"). The narrative focuses on a group of friends who are trying to find out what happened to the sister of one of them who disappeared on her way to New York. The group is comprised of Clover, her ex-boyfriend Max, Megan, and the couple, Nina and Abe. The missing girl's name is Melanie and she is Clover's sister. The group stops at a gas station where Melanie sent a message to Clover, and she asks the attendant by the name of Hill, if he remembers her at all. He lets her know that people disappear in the area of Glore Valley, a mining town. The group continues on and they're hammered with heavy rains. They decide to take shelter at a visitor center, which oddly enough has no rain around it. As they look around the whole area is empty, but Abe eventually finds a wall with posters of missing persons, one of which is Melanie. As they continue to investigate the space, they discover another house underneath it. Things take a dark turn when a masked psycho kills Abe, and then proceeds to kill everyone else in the group. They all re-awake at the same place, with memories of being killed, only this time around, their photos are also on the missing persons panel that Abe checked before. They realize the night is repeating, something that an hourglass in the main room is clocking. They once again suffer gruesome deaths, and eventually realize they have to work together since these are going to continue repeating themselves, until they become trapped in that reality.
Most video game adaptations don't fare very well. And it's typically easy to pinpoint the issues, namely understanding who the characters are, where their motivations lie, and making them believable in whatever scenarios they find themselves in. Even the mildly successful adaptations such as Paul W. S. Anderson's "Resident Evil" series, never primed for a very developed central persona, particularly when it came to its heroine Alice, much less any of the supporting characters. "Until Dawn" has very similar issues, not to mention that it bypasses much of the context setting for whatever is indeed happening with these characters. There are of course the tropes of the horror genre, namely a group of young people seeking out someone who disappeared (there's always a group of people at the wrong place, which is the case for "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", "The Hills Have Eyes", "Wrong Turn" series, and the list goes on), but this one takes a supernatural twist, with dashes of "Groundhog Day". Meaning, the deaths keep happening until these individuals can find out what's at the root of everything, otherwise they face being trapped in that reality forever. David F. Sandberg manages to create a very effective ominous scenario and the production design also plays a considerable part in it. However the storyline itself has some considerable gaps, something that extends to the characters themselves that are rather copycats from so many other horror films, meaning that the film fails to exhibit much originality when it comes to the horror genre. The cast tries their best with the material they have, and as usual Peter Stormare manages to be the most memorable performer of the ensemble. The production team is solid, including Maxime Alexandre's cinematography, Benjamin Wallfisch's score, Jennifer Spence's production design, and the entire prosthetics team. David F. Sandberg is a talented filmmaker and he deserves better material than this.
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