Review: Until Dawn

Directed by: David F. Sandberg

Written by: Gary Dauberman & Blair Butler

Starring: Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion, Ji-young Yoo, Belmont Cameli, Maia Mitchell

Rating: [2/5]

No matter how many times you fail, video games give the player the chance to try again. A chance for redemption presents itself until the right combination of skill and luck gets the player across the line. It ultimately creates the cathartic sense of achievement that gamers enjoy the most of the experience. Utilizing a video game as its direct inspiration and the structure of one as well, Until Dawn tries to attempt to provide a unique experience but unfortunately ultimately fails. 

In search for her missing sister, Clover (Ella Rubin) and a group of her friends make their way to a secluded town. When they end up in an empty visitors center, a masked killer tracks them down and kills them all. Surprisingly, they regain consciousness as if they got another do-over, and they learn they must survive the night if they hope to escape this hellscape. 

Having no experience with the game this film seeks to adapt, the promise of Until Dawn centered on these individuals trying to survive while a whole host of scary creatures tried to kill them. It gives off the equivalence of Happy Death Day, but instead of a singular masked individual killing off our leads, there’s a murderer’s row of scary beings. At the very least, it creates something worth checking out for the sheer curiosity of how it will play out; at least see some creativity in the way these monsters will kill these characters. 

While this film does display some of this creativity, it all happens in service of a very lackluster narrative at the center. As these deaths continue to transpire, the characters begin to figure out their situation. The night will continue to replay, but it appears they only get a certain number of repeats before they join the wall of missing individuals who have also found themselves in the same situation. Some moments of promise quickly falter under the unfortunate reality that the film begins to lose its excitement very quickly. After a while the repetitive nature of the story harms the overall enjoyment simply because it lacks the propulsive energy to continue our investment in how these characters figure out a solution to this conundrum.

It also does not help that the cast assembled for this project just did not work. When bringing together an ensemble for horror films, excellent acting is never the expectation, but these poor actors could not overcome the already-thin screenplay they received. Even when seeing Odessa A’zion prior to her explosive entrance to the mainstream with Marty Supreme, no one found safety in a screenplay where the more it revealed of the actual truth of what happens in this circumstance, the less interesting it became. An unfortunate place for any cast to try and dig themselves out of, but they also did not do anything worth praising either, which leads to the additional disappointment of this project as a whole. 

This lack of satisfaction especially stings seeing as it displays the disappointment in the career trajectory of David F. Sandberg. Bursting onto the scene with two extremely enjoyable horror films, Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation, he then left the genre altogether for superhero films that lacked any real zip to them. Until Dawn presented his return to the horror genre in hopes of getting back to what has worked well for him and to hopefully kick things off again in his career. Unfortunately, while he creates some fun moments of horror, this film as a whole falls far below the standard he has set. I can only hope this will allow him to go back into the lab and bring us something special again, but this film does not necessarily show the promise he once had. 

A fun concept that never quite worked out, Until Dawn has moments where it delivers on what it advertises in seeing a group of young adults repeatedly getting killed by monsters. If anything, it has some good surprises in some of the comedy it deploys, but as the narrative continues, the film shows it does not have much going for it all the way until it reaches its final faceplant of a finale that crystalizes the lack of quality of this production as a whole. Definitely some fun to be had but nothing worth writing home about.