Movie Review: Until Dawn

When Hollywood Forgets How to Tell a Coherent Story

Until Dawn had everything going for it as source material—a tight interactive horror experience that was already structured like a movie. The game gave them a perfect blueprint: eight friends return to an isolated mountain lodge, supernatural wendigo creatures, choices that matter. It was practically begging to be adapted.

But no. Apparently, that wasn't good enough for David F. Sandberg and the gang at Screen Gems.

Here's what really gets me: instead of following the game's proven formula, they decided to throw it all out and create some convoluted time-loop nightmare that makes absolutely no sense. One year after her sister Melanie mysteriously disappeared, Clover and her friends head into the remote valley where she vanished in search of answers. Exploring an abandoned visitor center, they find themselves stalked by a masked killer and horrifically murdered one by one…only to wake up and find themselves back at the beginning of the same evening.

So we've got a time loop. Fine. But then they're forced to relive the nightmare again and again - only each time the killer threat is different, each more terrifying than the last. Wait, what? So it's not just a time loop—it's a time loop where the rules change every night? And apparently they have a limited number of deaths left (13 nights), and the only way to escape is to survive until dawn.

Pick. One. Concept.

The most infuriating part is watching this thing try to be five different horror movies at once. You've got your slasher with the masked killer, your supernatural horror with wendigos thrown in for good measure, your psychological thriller with the whole "fears made manifest" nonsense, and your body horror with people exploding from bad water. The explosion deaths caused by bad water originate from her self-destructive tendencies. I'm sorry, what? Her self-destructive tendencies make people explode when they drink water?

And don't even get me started on that ending. There is a montage section that felt like it would have been better exploring than speeding through it. You spend the entire movie building up this elaborate mythology about time loops and fear manifestations, and then you just... montage through it? It's like they ran out of budget, looked at their watch, and said "Well, we've got six minutes left, better wrap this up."

The worst part is that Hill explains that Glore valley has been using her fears like a "battery" to make things run, and that the monsters that have been hunting the friends each night are a manifestation of Clover's own fears. So the whole thing is just one character's psychological breakdown? After spending 90 minutes establishing rules about time loops and limited deaths, we find out it's all in her head? That's not clever—that's lazy.

And the cherry on top of this narrative disaster? Clover views some patient files, including one for Josh Washington—a character from the original game who has absolutely nothing to do with this story. It's like they couldn't decide if they wanted to make a sequel, a reboot, or something entirely new, so they just threw in random references and called it a day.

Louis Peitzman of Vulture wrote that Until Dawn has "a pile-on of ideas that threaten to collapse the movie under its own weight", and honestly, that's being generous. This isn't a pile-on of ideas—it's a pile-on of half-baked concepts that the writers clearly didn't know how to connect.

The game was already a movie. It had character development, meaningful choices, and a coherent mythology that built to a satisfying climax. All they had to do was follow it. Instead, we got a time-loop slasher that's also a psychological thriller that's also a supernatural horror movie that's also a commentary on self-destructive behavior.

Sometimes the best adaptations are the most faithful ones. Too bad nobody told the filmmakers that before they decided to remake Groundhog Day, but also Scream, but also A Nightmare on Elm Street, but set it in an abandoned visitor center with a confusing mythology about fear batteries.

Rating: 2/5 stars - Decent practical effects and committed performances completely undermined by a script that couldn't decide what story it wanted to tell.