Henry O'Brien
Film adaptations of horror video games have been, at best, mediocre or misunderstood. While the films of the Resident Evil franchise can be reclaimed under the guise of Paul W.S. Anderson’s metalcore authorship, plenty of others crashed and burned like Doom (2005) and Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023). Until Dawn, the latest from horror director David F. Sandberg (Lights Out and Anabelle: Creation), sadly falls into the latter category.
A film adaptation of the popular 2015 video game that revolves around the mechanics of the Butterfly Effect, Until Dawn mostly scraps that in order to experiment with various styles and subgenres in horror— the slasher film, supernatural horror, body horror, monster movies, survival films and found footage. More specifically, Sandberg uses a similar storyline to the Christopher Landon film Happy Death Day, where the protagonists die over and over, repeating the same day. While the film occasionally has fun with the concept, incorporating a range of horror film staples, including masked serial killers and ghosts, the end result is a bore with very few scares. Making an adaptation into something of its own cinematically isn’t a bad thing. However, making a horror movie full of the biggest genre cliches and contrivances becomes unforgivable.
The sins of the Until Dawn movie aren’t because it strictly adheres to the source materials, but the differences between the film and the video game can highlight the former’s poor writing quality. The game uses the Butterfly Effect, a concept from chaos theory, to create a replayable experience and turn standard teen horror tropes into red herrings. Additionally, there was a clear tension between the eight teenagers and it goads players into actively hating the playable characters so much that they would kill them.
While much of that tension is not feasible in the medium, the film version of Until Dawn fails to utilize the Happy Death Day narrative in a new or unique way. Once the group of five young friends (Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion, Ji-young Yoo, Belmont Cameli) gets trapped in the loop, there’s a hesitancy to experiment with the concept. On one of the repeated nights, Clover (Rubin), who brings her friends to this place on the one-year anniversary of her sister’s disappearance, gets possessed by a spirit and murders one of her friends to restart the loop. Indeed, there are other nights when the friends kill each other to start the loop over. However, while the film portrays these moments as acts of betrayal in the moment, they seem to be almost entirely forgotten by the time the characters wake up for the next night loop.Instead of experimenting with the idea of characters reliving the same horror every night, Until Dawn delves into rehashed depictions of trauma and uses conventional methods of jump scares.
Clover deals with the guilt of losing her sister and now the thought of losing her friends. Aside from never really seeing any true moments of friendship between Clover and the others, her depression manifests in ill-defined ways. The film’s evil psychiatrist, who experiments on the teenagers, including Hill (Peter Stormare, the one actor to appear in both the game and film), and even explains that the monsters and serial killer terrorizing Clover and her friends are supposedly manifestations of her grief. As it turns out, nothing ever backs up this connection and the movie feels like yet another example of trauma dumping.
In terms of building suspense or dread, Until Dawn follows the familiar formula of a jump scare, where the camera or character follows a noise before investigating and finding nothing. Once the camera pans or whips to its initial position, there is a loud noise, and a creepy-looking creature attacks the protagonist. It’s a formula that Blumhouse has used in many of its weaker films, and its predictability will be grating for any experienced horror fan.
The shame of it all is that Sandberg, who told The Hollywood Reporter he was excited by the film’s inclusion of so many different horror subgenres, genuinely tried to give audiences an abundance of style. Indeed, the most invigorating and creepy section of the film was when we saw the found footage of the characters reliving a nightmare in new and terrifying ways. Sandberg tapped into the creepiness of glitches that make found footage so unsettling. Until Dawn suffers from not letting Sandberg tap into this more. The rest of the direction feels so anonymous when compared to contemporary Blumhouse slop. Sandberg made his return to the genre where he made his bones following two Shazam! films, but his latest horror work falls short of being some grand homecoming for the Swede. It becomes yet another video game adaptation that feels flat and unexciting. And in the case of Until Dawn, it is the scariest experience of all, being completely boring.
