UNTIL DAWN Review: Far Better As a Standalone Horror Flick Than a Videogame Adaptation

Adapting videogames into other media, specifically film or television, has often proven to be a challenge many accept willingly, but few actually succeed in translating the gameplay mechanics, design, or conception into an equally immersive experience.

 

It’s made all the more difficult, if not impossible, the further a particular game departs from the rules, conventions, and tropes of the non-videogame media. Videogames, like film, are art, but they’re often distinctly forms of art, related, but far from identical in their aims, intentions, or effects. 

 

That, in a nutshell, describes Until Dawn, the 2015 survival horror videogame developed by Supermassive Games and published by Sony Entertainment. Courtesy of its dependence on choice-driven, branching storylines, the ability to direct the actions of multiple characters, a uniquely engaging horror-based premise that leads to more than one hundred different endings, the videogame delivered a deeply immersive, addictive experience for users of the Sony PlayStation platform. 

 

A straight-up videogame-to-film adaptation all but impossible, a genre-experienced filmmaking team including director David F. Sandberg (Shazam: Fury of the Gods, Shazam, Lights Out) and co-writers Gary Dauberman (Salem’s Lot, It: Chapter 1-2, Annabelle) and Blair Butler (The Invitation, Polaroid) decided to use the videogame primarily as inspiration, borrowing key or core elements and integrating them into a survival horror version of Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise-starring sci-fi actioner where Cruise’s selfish, egocentric character, William Cage, dies hundred of times on a battlefield, gaining the knowledge and experience necessary to defeat an alien invasion. 

 

Here, the central plot turns on a familiar device, a group of twenty-somethings, connected by friendship or dating, venture far afield from their home turf, presumably a city or city-adjacent town into a wilderness area where strange, supernatural events occur, specifically a time loop that traps them on the wrong side of a hurricane-strength storm, a multi-story cabin-like structure in the woods (an unwelcome center), and a masked, mute, pickaxe-wielding maniac in overalls and heavy work boots. Said pickaxe-wielding maniac effortlessly picks off the easily panicked, unprepared tourists.

 

Their first encounter with evil inside the house emphasizes gory, gnarly kills of the slasher variety (kudos to the practical effects team), before an hourglass on the wall resets the “game,” forcing them to re-experience the same events, albeit slightly worse for wear each time out, and with the memory of their respective grisly ends fully intact. 

 

Shallowly drawn and even more shallowly developed over Until Dawn's sub-two-hour runtime, the time loop-doomed characters include Clover (Ella Rubin), the nominal lead, a year away from losing both her mother and her sister, Melanie (Maia Mitchell), Max (Michael Cimino), Clover’s sympathetic, if slightly clingy, ex-boyfriend, Nina (Odessa A’zion), one of Clover’s close friends, Abel (Belmont Cameli), Nina’s newest boyfriend, and Megan (Ji-young Yoo), another longtime friend. Alone among the friend group, Megan's been "gifted" with clairvoyance. As a result, she seemingly becomes the cursed house’s favorite victim, dying not just painfully, but slowly too.

 

Individually, neither the characters nor the actors performing them stand out in any meaningful way, the latter less a function of skill or talent than an underwritten screenplay that asks almost nothing of the cast except to look worried and anxious one moment and run frantically the next moment before being dispatched via familiar slasher norms, usually at the end of sharp or blunt objects. Once they all die, the “game” resets, restarting the moment they entered the (un)welcome center. Only surviving the night and seeing the dawn of the title will free them from the time-loop curse. 

 

Unlike other similarly premised time-loop entries (e.g., Palm Springs, Happy Death Day, Groundhog Day), the characters in Until Dawn don’t have unlimited lives. How many lives they have remains an open question. They come back repeatedly, but there’s a physical, mental, and spiritual cost. Too many resets and the cursed house “wins” (i.e., takes their souls forever), an element that adds a thin veneer of urgency or modest desperation to the repeated resets. Anything else would, like a character admits, turn into endless repetition: Without any novelty, variation, or actual stakes, scares of any kind become negligible or even non-existent. 

 

That issue also applies, of course, to the audience, fans and non-fans of the original videogame alike. Here, Sandberg, an old hand at delivering effective scares, shocks, and jumps (Lights Out, specifically), elevates a script heavy on homage and replaying familiar horror hits, keeping audience interest just high enough to skip past the usual assortment of under-explained phenomena, character motivations, or the not-so-surprise villain’s perfunctory explanation for the time loop-based supernatural curse.