Director: David F. Sandberg
Stars: Odessa A’zion, Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino
PlayStation Studios might be enjoying some time in the sun on TV thanks to Craig Mazin’s continuing adaptation of The Last of Us, but the transfer of video games to the big screen is still an often clunky affair. Box office bonanza it may be, but by most accounts A Minecraft Movie is as worthless an IP cash-in as The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and the last time we were treated to a survival horror ordeal, it proved to be just that – Five Nights at Freddy’s lives long in the memory as one of the worst nights at the flicks this decade. Granted, not one of these is a PlayStation Studios property, but still; the portents for Until Dawn weren’t rosy.
Jettisoning pretty much the entire story of the choose-your-fate game narrative, Until Dawn arrives courtesy of two veterans of the spurious Annabelle franchise; David F. Sandberg, director of the cantankerous Annabelle: Creation, and scribe Gary Dauberman (all of those movies, and director of the underrated Annabelle Comes Home). Their presence here might quickly key horror fans into the type of disposable scares in store for them. This is poppy, silly, throw-it-all-at-the-wall Friday night funhouse horror. The kind that doesn’t particularly care if it’s coherent so long as it ticks a predictable set of boxes at a rapid pace.
Where the game took place over one long night at a remote alpine resort, the movie iteration sees five college kids roadtripping to a lost mining town in the woods. It’s been a year since Melanie (Maia Mitchell) went missing in the area, and her sister Clover (Ella Rubin) has decided that now, finally, might be the time to try and track her down. Four of her pals are along for the ride. Taking a tip from a sketchy gas station attendant (Peter Stormare, the one holdover from the video game cast), they rock up at Glore Valley only to find themselves the latest test subjects in an elaborate and totally inexplicable time-loop trap. The arbitrary goal is to stay alive (you guessed it) until dawn… although dawn only ever seems about 10 minutes away. Die, and the night resets. But the threats to their lives vary and multiply every time. It’s a massive deviation from the source material, where players make choices that (modestly) change the narrative, but where there are no take-backsies.
Until Dawn is chaotic in the extreme, but you can’t accuse it of resting on it’s laurels. Sandberg goes at the undercooked script like he’s on a speed-run. Only the most cursory of broad character traits are sketched in, and they’re drawn from a laundry list of stereotypes. Megan (Ji-young Yoo) is a wannabe psychic. Psych major Abe (Belmont Cameli) is a self-serving jock type. Max (Michael Cimino) is the sensitive guy with a crush on the leading lady. Tellingly, the most interesting is the one who doesn’t quite fit into a pre-determined character type; Odessa A’zion’s Nina. But even she’s underdeveloped.
Their menaces in the night are just as cookie-cutter. Sandberg piles on masked psychos, witches and misunderstood wendigos (the most overt nod to the game outside of Stormare). It’s a little like Annabelle Comes Home in that respect. Until Dawn throws a variety pack of genre staples at the screen with only the barest of non-explanations tacked on at the end to suggest a reason behind it all. There’s really no logic to be found, while most of the dialogue in the movie scans as though it’s being delivered direct to the audience, not as interplay between the characters sharing any given scene.
While it’s easy to find all of this disengaging and more than a little frustrating, Until Dawn is at least commendably unpretentious about it, prioritising goofy fun over all else. It runs toward the funny with the energy of a slapstick routine, and generates enough goodwill to have us tolerate it’s über-nonsensical story beats. You could decry moments like Clover getting dragged into a witch’s house, flailing for something to hold onto and somehow missing a really handy chain fence that’s well within reach but the general feeling is that you’d be wasting your breath. Until Dawn doesn’t care that it’s idiotic, hoary and cliché. Instead it wears such badges with pride. This gusto for bottom-of-the-barrel hijinks is unblinking, redolent of equally silly and colourful franchise fare like Escape Room or Final Destination.
Some of it works well enough, some of it doesn’t. A mini found-footage section is like micro-dosing a V/H/S movie and contains some of Until Dawn‘s most rapid-fire tricks. Elsewhere, however, Sandberg seems as generally derisive of mental health as he did in his troublesome Lights Out, leaving something of a sour aftertaste. It’s a real rollercoaster ride, never staying in place long enough to engender genuine umbridge. Ultimately, it’s just not worthy getting pissy over.
That sounds like damning it with faint praise, and maybe it is. This is as throwaway as multiplex horror gets, but with such low ambitions Sandberg dedicates his time to hitting his barn-door-sized beats as hard and fast as he can. There’s a pleasing streak of gooey gore running through his film, again all in the hopes of sating horror hounds with little quick fixes. This is cinema as snack food. You might long for something a little healthier after a while, but it’s sickly and salty enough ’til something substantial comes along (Sinners is right there).
The video game is better in every conceivable way but, given the subgenre’s big screen legacy, this could’ve been a lot worse.
The Lost Highway Hotel 