Director – David F. Sandberg, Screenplay – Blair Butler & Gary Dauberman, Based on the Playstation Videogame Until Dawn (2015), Producers – Gary Dauberman, Roy Lee, Lotta Losten, Mia Maniscalco, Asad Qizilbash, David F. Sandberg & Carter Swan, Photography – Maxime Alexandre, Music – Benjamin Wallfisch, Visual Effects – UPP (Supervisor – Viktor Muller), Special Effects Supervisor – Paul Stephenson, Creature & Prosthetic Effects – Applied Arts FX Studio, Production Design – Jennifer Spence. Production Company – Playstation Productions/Mangata/Vertigo Entertainment/Coin Operated/TSG Entertainment.
Cast
Ella Rubin (Clover Paul), Michael Cimino (Max), Odessa A’zion (Nina Riley), Belmont Cameli (Abe), Ji-Young Yoo (Megan), Peter Stormare (Dr Alan Hill), Maia Mitchell (Melanie Paul)
Plot
Clover Paul and three friends travel to the town of Glore Valley, the last known location of Clover’s missing sister Melanie. They arrive at a mysterious house that exists on the other side of a strange demarcation line from the rest of the landscape. The group explore the house only to be attacked by an axe-wielding masked figure. Several of them are killed but when the hourglass in the main room turns over, the day resets and they are alive again. Each time they face new and outlandish menaces. Through the continued assaults, they try to find a means to escape. The way to do so lies in the secrets of the mining town that collapsed beneath where the house is built and how its inhabitants became the experimental subjects of a sinister psychiatrist.
Until Dawn (2015) was a videogame designed for the PlayStation. In the game, eight characters arrive at a mountainside lodge where Hannah’s twin sister disappeared a year ago where they must fight a series of monsters, while trying to piece together clues in order to affect an escape. The game was notable for its butterfly effect gameplay where character actions create different irrevocable pathways of action where characters are permanently killed and cannot be reloaded from a saved position. The game was popular and two spinoffs have been released. This is now a film version that is produced by Playstation Productions in collaboration with Roy Lee and his Vertigo Entertainment who have been behind assorted English-language remakes of Asian films and the Lego movies, among others.
Swedish director David F. Sandberg first emerged with three-minute short Lights Out (2013) and was given money by James Wan to expand it to feature length with Lights Out (2016). Sandberg then went onto the also James Wan-produced Annabelle: Creation (2017) and then DC Comics superhero films Shazam! (2019) and its sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023). The script for Until Dawn is from Gary Dauberman who wrote the Annabelle films and It (2017) and sequel, as well as directed Annabelle Comes Home (2019) and Salem’s Lot (2024).
The film retains many of the basics of the game, including Peter Stormare playing the same role of the sinister psychiatrist he did in the game. The film follows the same general plotlines involving the characters arrived at a house (which has been moved from a mountainside to house in a twilight zone of sorts) and the missing sister, along with the background involving the miners, the sinister psychiatrist and the creatures (which the game explains are wendigos).
Trapped in a timeloop – (l to r) Ji-Young Yoo, Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion and Belmont Cameli
Dropped has been the butterfly effect and in its place, the film adopts the Timeloop theme, which has proven extraordinarily popular on screens ever since Groundhog Day (1993). More recent years have seen it employed in a number of horror films with the likes of Happy Death Day (2017) and Brightwood (2022). The film that Until Dawn has the greatest resemblance to is the Japanese horror Re/Member (2022) about a group of students caught in a timeloop as they go through a regular school day and then face a horror that rampages through a school slaughtering them, only to be resurrected the following day and have to go through the same again.
The film has a potentially interesting set-up as the characters arrive at the house where there is a line where it is raining on one side and not on the other. As the premise starts to unfold, David F. Sandberg provides a reasonable level of splatter and gore – the effects as various members of the group drink glasses of water that cause them to explode is amusingly cool. Among the cast, Odessa A’zion, who previously appeared in Hellraiser (2022), starts to distinguish herself as a genre regular.
The main problem with the film is that it is a moderately interesting set up followed by a formula horror film. I read one review that likened Until Dawn to Cabin in the Woods (2012), but that it exactly what it isn’t. There are similarities – a group at a house in the woods, a variety of different creatures served up. On the other hand, Cabin in the Woods derived its originality from being a meta-horror film. Until Dawn serves up a variety of monstrous creations but they are utterly generic. There is nothing original or individualistic about them. There is no sense of dread and uncanny about the netherworld we are in as you had in the Silent Hill (2006) film. And as such, at all it ends up becoming is a film where you experience some occasionally interesting effects without any engagement in what is happening.
