Review: Until Dawn (2025)

Until Dawn (2025)

Rated R for strong bloody horror violence, gore and language throughout

Score: 3 out of 5

Until Dawn is a flawed but generally alright movie that I'm glad I waited for Netflix to see. The big sticking point that stopped me from seeing it in theaters was, ironically, its big selling point, the fact that it's based on one of my favorite horror video games of the last decade. Until Dawn the game was amazing and still holds up ten years later, so I should've been excited for this, especially with David F. Sandberg, a guy who's made plenty of fun, solid movies before, in the director's chair. However, not only did the film's writers Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler have mixed track records at best, but the trailers indicated that it would be a very loose adaptation, one less interested in recreating the story of the game than in the experience of actually playing it, specifically the idea of its branching paths and going through the story multiple times to get different endings where different characters live or die and using that to do Groundhog Day or Happy Death Day as a serious horror movie. It was an interesting, outside-the-box idea (and one that I'm not surprised Butler, a former host on the gaming-centric cable network G4, would come up with), but as a fan of the game, it did feel like a bit of a cheat.

And yet, I have a co-worker who thought the trailer for this movie was one of the scariest things she'd ever seen and has been wanting to see it for months, so I decided, hey, why not? Spooky season's coming up, may as well. And the result was... I enjoyed myself! Beneath the gimmick, this is a pretty by-the-numbers modern horror movie that felt like it left a lot of more interesting ideas sitting on the table, albeit one that's elevated by Sandberg's hand behind the camera to produce some genuinely frightening moments, and it did do some interesting things with the time-loop conceit in the third act. The cast was all solid enough to get me invested in their underwritten characters, the scares got me jumping, the kills were prodigious and bloody, and while the trailers were honest about this being merely inspired by the game, I did appreciate some of the nods indicating that the filmmakers actually played it. There's very little here that I haven't seen done better in either other movies or the game it's based on, but it still works as both a fun curiosity for fans of the game and an entertaining movie in its own right.

We start with one of the most time-worn setups in horror: five twentysomething friends, led by a young woman named Clover searching for her missing sister Melanie, travel to an empty cabin in the woods searching for her, where they get merked in rapid succession... only to wake up again a few hours earlier, shortly after they arrived at the cabin. They quickly realize that they're caught in a loop and cannot escape this house unless they manage to survive the night, a task that's easier said than done as they get hit with all manner of foes: a masked slasher, an evil witch, wendigos, tainted water, and last but certainly not least, Dr. Alan Hill, a mysterious psychiatrist who was in the area after a mining disaster that wiped out the nearby town and seemingly unleashed some kind of evil in the hills. They're not the first people to find themselves claimed by this eldritch locale, either, and none of the previous victims had lasted more than thirteen days. For our protagonists to make it out alive, they need to learn more about the house, the old town, the mines, and Dr. Hill's involvement in order to figure out what must be done to break the loop and get out alive.

There's not really much more to it than that. The central plot thread involving Clover searching for Melanie is resolved exactly how you think it will be once we learn the fates of all the people who've wound up trapped here before. The protagonists have relationship drama in their past, but none of it matters past the first five minutes. One of Clover's friends claims she's psychic, and it's hinted that she actually is, but it only comes up once when they're searching for an item in the house. There's a twist in the third act that felt designed to call back to the game's big twist, complete with a direct nod to the character involved at the center of it, which felt like it could've taken the movie in a far more interesting direction had it followed through on it, making me go "oh, so this is what the game would've been like if it'd been told entirely from this person's perspective!" In the end, however, the twist here doesn't really contribute much and seemingly leaves more questions than it solves, especially concerning the question of just how much of what we saw is real. What made me love the game's twist as much as I did was how it zagged where I thought it would zig, and this movie's take on it felt like the dumb version of that. This film had plenty of things to like about it, but the writing was not one of them.

And yet, I still found myself engrossed with this film in spite of its storytelling issues, for one simple reason: it, like few other movies I've seen, captured the feeling of playing a video game, especially one with multiple branching paths and ways to get to your goal, and experimenting with the different options available in the hopes of beating it. The main characters, above all else, felt like gamers, even if they weren't shown anywhere in the film to actually play video games, as they approached the survival challenge placed in front of them not as a grueling life-or-death scenario but as one that gives them room to play around in order to figure out how to beat it. After all, they've got thirteen lives, so if they blow it on this try, all they'll face is some short-term pain before it's all reset. This is still a horror movie, of course, and failing to take their predicament seriously does come back to bite the protagonists in the end when they're down to their last life. But even there, the way this plays out feels like what happens when you've been caught up in a video game for far too long, to the point that you don't notice the sun slowly coming up outside your window and that you have to be at school or work in a few hours. (I've just gotten back into Civilization V. I know the feeling.) This is a movie that runs on video game logic and is very up front about it, and between that and the many nods to the game's story, lore, and freakiest moments peppered throughout, it felt like a movie made by people who loved the game and came up with a tribute to it that didn't recreate its story but did recapture the feeling of playing it.

David F. Sandberg proves himself here to once again be a capable director who can elevate a subpar script, the film being jam-packed with tons of creepy moments that make full use of the "monster mash" nature of the setup. If nothing else, the scares are diverse, the film dipping its toes into every subgenre from slashers to supernatural horror to monster movies to body horror to even a brief, plot-relevant found-footage bit late in the film. Again, this is an altogether shallow film built from bits and pieces of other horror movies, one where I'm not entirely sure if the plot hangs together all that well when I stop to think about it, but letting Sandberg go wild with many different kinds of horror meant that every new scene felt fresh and I never knew what to expect. The creature effects are creepy and frightening, and the gore flows like a geyser as every character is killed violently multiple times in their attempts to make it through the night in one piece. The cast is respectable, especially Ella Rubin as Clover feeling take-charge and approaching the scenario the way I'd approach a video game (appropriately enough) and Peter Stormare, reprising in live-action his role from the game, making Dr. Hill feel like a threatening presence even if the script can't quite figure out what to do with him. The characters were all written as one-note caricatures, but the cast was such that I was able to like them anyway.

The Bottom Line

The game is far better, and now that I think about it, even this film's version of the story probably would've been better as a video game too. However, that's not to say it's a wholly worthless film, because as a lightweight spook show, it gets the job done, serves up a lot of action and mayhem, and contains plenty of neat nods to the game that I appreciated even if it wasn't a direct adaptation. It's the definition of a movie to turn off your brain to and have fun with.