Putting the grind into Groundhog Day.
Time loops are nothing new in horror, but that’s not going to stop Until Dawn, Sony’s latest attempt to spin its video game back catalogue into a viable cinematic franchise, but unfortunately, it’s not just the temporal tautology that makes things feel tediously familiar.
Following the disappearance of a young girl named Melanie, her sister Clover (Ella Rubin) and four friends gather outside of a gas station near Melanie’s last known location to do “hand stuff” to mark her passing. But when Clover is told be creepy station owner Peter Stormare that her sister went missing after heading to the nearby Glore Valley, the friends head off to see if they can pick up her trail. But after passing through a curiously ferocious yet stationary rainstorm, all that awaits them is an apparently abandoned visitor centre. That is until night falls and the hourglass on the wall turns itself over.
In a movie that could have been subtitled “Tour de Tropes”, the most unwelcome horror trope it chooses to use right off the bat is the current trend for assembling a group of teen characters so immediately unlikable that you’re straight away rooting for whatever nameless horror to dispatch them with extreme prejudice. Good news, then, that Until Dawn wastes little to no time in picking them off in quick and grisly succession and then hits the reset button to do it all over again. Oh wait, I get it. We’re here for the suffering, not the hope. Kind of like being alive in 2025.
Although it’s surprisingly not the product of the McDonalds Of HorrorTM, there’s a distinctly Blumhouse production line feeling to Until Dawn, flavourless and bland. David F Sandberg does a competent but unremarkable job of shepherding the story, but he’s not helped by a clumsy screenplay that largely treats the characters as interchangeably generic and flat, underwhelmingly lit cinematography which seems to stifle any sense of energy or personality. Even the late appearance of an overarching antagonist Dr Alan Hill (nowhere near as fun as his British cousin Harry) fails to lift proceedings that much.
It’s main problem is that, although its central idea of a loop which changes the horror each time to keep you at peak fear is a good one, Until Dawn loses interest in it half way through and delivers a time-jump to go-around thirteen without even the decency to give us a half-hearted montage of splattery discarded storyboard ideas, thereby bringing its defining quality: the cavalcade of horror cliches to a grinding halt with the wheel of misfortune stuck on wendigo. Even teases of werewolves and killer clowns fail to pay off.
There’s a point in Until Dawn where one of the Gen-Z template characters tells the others he’ll “be right back” and there’s zero reaction from his companions, suggesting the horror world has moved on and we’ve forgotten Randy Meeks. Horror is no longer self-aware, it’s oblivious. He does at least get immediately slaughtered after saying it, so some things never change.
Part endurance test, part worst escape room ever, Until Dawn can’t really disguise its video game roots nor fully makes the stylistic leap to motion picture. I’m sure people who have played the game will get a kick out of seeing their favourite levels play out like a 105-minute cut scene but as a standalone movie that’s about time standing still, it gets old fast. The horror genre is by definition a broad church, but going from Sinners to this brings fresh blood to the phrase “from the sublime to the ridiculous”.
