Until Dawn Movie Review
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Until Dawn is the latest horror videogame adaptation, joining the likes of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. How does it stack up to its predecessors? Read my full Until Dawn movie review to find out!
Clover (Ella Rubin) is looking for her missing sister, Melanie (Maia Mitchell), who mysteriously disappeared shortly after their mother died. She is joined by her best friend Nina (Odessa A’zion), her ex-boyfriend Max (Michael Cimino), Nina’s boyfriend Abe (Belmont Cameli), and Max’s stepsister Megan (Ji-young Yoo).
The group journeys to the sparsely populated area where Melanie was last seen. A clerk at a rural gas station tells them that Melanie may have disappeared in a tiny nearby mining town. They head there and take cover in an empty visitors’ center during a heavy storm.
A masked maniac emerges out of the shadows and attacks them, killing the friends one by one. He dispatches all of them within the first half hour. The friends come back to life and are stalked and killed by various monsters in a repeated cycle of murder and resurrection.
They’re stuck in a time warp. The only way to escape is to survive until the sun rises. If they die too many times, they’ll become monsters themselves. Their plight is somewhat similar to that of Tree in Happy Death Day. Unfortunately, Until Dawn lacks the wit and sharp humor of that film, which I covered in my birthday horror movies article.
Same Old, same old
This movie has a promising premise, but it doesn’t offer much novelty. The characters are generic. None of them stand out and there’s no reason to care about any of them. This movie would have been vastly improved if it had even one compelling character.
I will give Until Dawn credit for looking good. The production values are solid, especially considering this is a relatively low budget film. The cinematography is appropriately dark and the monsters look cool. There’s plenty of gore, but there are so many gruesome horror movies these days that blood and limbs spewing everywhere has lost any sense of shock value.
The main problem here is that no matter how creepy you make your monsters look, it won’t matter unless we care about their victims. The cast is attractive, and their performances are fine considering what little they have to work with script wise, but there’s no one that stands out as doing particularly great work.
The story feels anticlimactic, especially toward the end. There’s no real suspense or tension. I don’t think Until Dawn was ever intended to be a super scary horror film. It definitely leans more to the comedy side. But the humor is also the same stuff that’s been done a million times in other horror movies.
I haven’t played the Playstation videogame, but reportedly this movie doesn’t follow the same storyline. I’m not sure who this movie was made for. Fans of the game will be disappointed by the lack of faithfulness to the source material, and other horror fans have better options when it comes to movies like this. Until Dawn lacks a compelling reason to exist.
Rating
Until Dawn is mildly amusing, but its lack of interesting characters keeps it from having a genuine impact.
Rating from 1 (avoid at all costs) to 10 (masterpiece): 5
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