Until Dawn opens in theaters Friday, April 25.
In David F. Sandberg’s lackluster Until Dawn, the horror game of the same name is transformed into an awkward hybrid of Groundhog Day and The Cabin in the Woods. This is far from a “two great tastes that taste great together” miracle: Unlike the source material, this movie doesn’t successfully unite various flavors of onscreen terror as much as it haphazardly smashes them together. That smashing can occasionally be a glorious, bloody, body-exploding blast, and there are plenty of moments where Sandberg, working again with Annabelle: Creation cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, stokes our anticipation for something horrible to leap out of the darkness. It’s nearly everything else – the painfully one-note performances, the clunky dialogue, the increasingly ineffective scares – that drags Until Dawn into a bottomless pit of its own making.
Most notably, this is a strange blend of wholesale reimagining and direct adaptation. The movie lifts some key elements from the game – including Peter Stormare as a menacing figure lurking in the shadows – while jettisoning its snowy setting, array of generically horny teens, and playfully cheeky tone. The loss of this last part is what makes Until Dawn unshakably strange: Without the goofiness, what we have here is a generic horror movie with the high-concept twist of five friends trying to survive endless variations on the same terrifying night. Sure, there are some gags, but none clever enough to cut through the shallow backstory of troubled Clover (Ella Rubin) searching for her missing sister. Where the flawed-yet-fun game gets its kicks from toying with scary-movie clichés, this self-serious adaptation only rarely feels like it’s in on the joke.
That’s not for lack of trying. Early on, as Clover and some superficially written friends drive through the rain and into the mysterious valley where they’ll soon be trapped, one of them points out that the car is the safest place they could be. The rest of the passengers then yell at him – a vehicle full of Randy Meeks types who know such hubris can only lead to a smiting from the horror gods. Maybe they’re right: Until Dawn is plenty mean-spirited and wrathful towards its characters, though these joyously macabre moments are too fleeting to inform the movie the way Randy’s horror-movie “rules” shape Scream.
In lieu of meaningfully skewering the tropes, Until Dawn leans into them, or worse: When the gang realizes they’re in a time loop, they allude, but don’t directly refer, to other movies with similar premises. (Best not to invite a bunch of unflattering comparisons.) As they try to figure out how to escape their predicament, Until Dawn becomes less of a strong horror movie in its own right and more like an amusement-park haunted house. Each room may be themed around a different classic of the genre, but they’re pale imitations of the real things.
Though each night is meant to be different from the last, there are a number of overlaps: A masked killer makes frequent appearances, and there’s a vain attempt at some connective tissue in the form of a flimsy, dead-end supernatural subplot. A shift into found footage clumsily tries to catch us up on some nights we don’t see in full, while the introduction of a psychological-mystery thread over-explains the monsters Until Dawn carries over from the game. But these are mere acts of re-creation, granting no additional insight into all the different methods and techniques filmmakers have dreamed up to give us nightmares. They don’t do much to give us a better sense of Clover’s plight – and they’re not all that scary, either. Sadly, you won’t find any brains or a beating heart amid Until Dawn’s abundant gore.
Sandberg is still a solid director, so he’s able to squeeze some fright from the shaky material fellow Conjuring Universe veteran Gary Dauberman and The Invitation screenwriter Blair Butler have handed him. Until Dawn ends with a tease for a sequel that seems closer in spirit to the game, which means he could very well get his very own do-over. Fingers crossed that movie isn’t as timid and indecisive as this one, which always feels like it’s being pulled in two different directions. One involves half-heartedly referring back to the game, reducing it to a collection of Easter eggs. The other points toward an original (albeit highly derivative), unrelated idea that’s coasting on Until Dawn’s name recognition. In the end, neither is the way to safety or horror-movie immortality for poor Clover.
