I'm going to preface this review with the fact that I am familiar with and have played the Until Dawn game once or twice, but I am by no means one of its devout fans. I keep meaning to play it and I'm sure I'll love it, but I just haven't gotten around to it. So while I have no negative feelings towards the game I also don't have any attachment to it. From what I know though, this is a sharp deviation from the source material.
The game came out in 2015 and has grown a large following thanks to its creative premise and clever butterfly effect story telling. Now ten years later we get to visit the world of Until Dawn in the theatre, and it ultimately wound up being a bit of a mixed bag for me. The film follows five friends on a sort of road trip following the last known whereabouts of one of their sisters who went missing one year before. Clover (the one with the missing sister), finds out about a potential place she may have gone missing, but when the gang finds it they have no idea what they are in store for. They explore an abandoned visitor center and find themselves stuck in a time loop where they must try survive until dawn while being hunted down by masked killers and mysterious creatures.
From a premise standpoint, I'd say this is a winner for the horror genre. The time loop aspect is used very well early on, allowing us to semi-get to know the central characters while also treating the gore fans to some wild kills. Each reset of the clock means five more deaths, and director David F. Sandberg gets very creative with how he takes these characters out. The horror makeup is quite strong throughout, and while there are moments of CGI there are also a lot of great practical gore effects which I will always support. Tonally this is pretty standard studio horror, operating largely to deliver jump scares, but the strong kills bump it up a notch for me. The setting also really worked for me, it's dark and creepy and that makes the scares work a lot better than they could have.
Sadly not everything works. For starters, the writing and acting is pretty weak. Ella Rubin does a solid job leading the film as Clover, and Peter Stormare is fun reprising his role from the game, but the rest of the gang just didn't do much to stand out from so many other films like this. It doesn't help that they're working with a script that ultimately just doesn't feel authentic, with a lot of lines feeling wildly forced and unnatural. My biggest issue though came with the final act. There are good things set up, but I found the climax to feel pretty rushed and somewhat anticlimactic. There's a fun tease at the end, but it feels like we're just really getting into the meat of things when that switch flips and makes it clear things are starting to wrap up. There are teases of character development that never come true, and the final act really feels like the filmmakers didn't know how to get the story there so they kind of just jumped to it.
On one hand, as a horror fan I like that this gives some great gore and allows the filmmakers to play around with different monsters and killers. On the other hand, it feels a like they didn't quite have a full story put together so the end result feels rushed and anticlimactic. I hope this does well so we can get another one of these, as the premise is clearly brimming with potential. This one just didn't quite hit that potential. 2.5/5
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