A movie adaptation of a video game, itself starring Hollywood actors, with gameplay like its own an interactive movie, "Until Dawn" is a strange one. It doesn't follow the game's plot, characters (save one) or really even its setting, instead taking the overall feel, like a small group of young adults in an isolated location terrorized by wendigos and a masked assailant. Gory deaths are also here, in all their R-rated glory, as well as the odd piece of cringy dialogue and that one annoying guy who you just can't wait to see get his comeuppance. Yup, it's a slasher film alright.
Only it's a bit deeper than that, much like the game itself: unique here though is that our cast of young actors are stuck in a time loop, reliving each night and being sliced, diced, blown-up, and more, repeatedly unless they can "survive the night." Or so explains a random witch, who momentarily turns main protagonist Clover (Ella Rubin) into a killer herself. Until she's hit by an SUV, that is, but boy am I getting ahead of myself.
See, Clover's sister Mel (Maia Mitchell) mysteriously disappeared a year ago, on her way to New York, just weeks after their mother dies off screen. Her friends stage a little getaway, in an attempt at getting closure, and the group finds themselves in Glore Valley, smack-dab in the middle of Nowhere, USA. On a rainy road, the only house they find is cryptically dry, the small area curiously surrounded by stormy clouds. Inside, the place looks abandoned, covered in dust, bone-dry pipes and electricity that only works when the plot calls for it. But once Nina (Odessa A'zion) signs the "guest book," night begins falls and that strange hourglass turns, sand slowly pouring and oh man, that's when things go off-rails and get a bit weird.
"Until Dawn" doesn't really make a whole lotta sense, introducing ideas like the mutations, mining towns, psychiatric wards, psychics, monsters taller than trees and emotional trauma, only for it to be another excuse to show a lot of blood and guts. Characters use their phones (which naturally don't have any reception) to record one night, die, only to conveniently forget they ever did until the "last night" they have; bruises and scratches carry over between "tries" but they never really seem to learn how to handle everything that's trying to mutilate them. Not that the flick plays fair: do you dare drink the water from the bathroom sink in a place like this? In a movie like this? I think I'd rather use one of my "lives" dying of dehydration.
It's never exactly clear why all of this is happening either; even when a reason is implied by someone, who's name and actor I won't spoil (though any quick interwebs search should show you), it never explains how they too can exist in this world; are they also attacked? Does their night repeat as well? Or perhaps they themselves just a pawn in some greater game? I honestly have no idea, and left the theater wondering why they even bothered trying to come up with an answer.
One thing the filmmakers do a bit differently is not have the same night endlessly repeat; that cloaked villain from the prior attempt doesn't appear on the next. And this allows the script, credited to Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler, to get in a cute line about how this "isn't like in those movies." Finally, characters in a horror movie that aren't your usual stereotypical idiots.
Only the kind of are: I counted twice where someone tripped when being chased, groups splitting up several times instead of all staying together, things even an idiot like me knows not to do in a film like this. Of course, I did pay to go see it, so jokes on me I guess.
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