UNTIL DAWN - Mark Reviews Movies

Until Dawn, Sony Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 24, 2025

The fun of Until Dawn is in its central gimmick, which allows screenwriters Blair Butler and Gary Dauberman to give us a hodgepodge of horror setups and killers. In that way, it's something of an appropriate adaptation of the video game of the same name, which also played with assorted horror clichés in a more straightforward manner. The clever part of this interpretation of the source material, however, is how it's akin to a kind of trial and error for the characters, who get to restart the game of being trapped in a horror movie over and over in an effort to get things right.

Basically, that boils down to this being a time-loop story, although the film gets some twisted enjoyment out of toying with that, too. After all our characters are killed for the first time by a masked and unstoppable murderer, the group realizes they're trapped in re-living the same night—just like in that one movie. A lot of movies have that premise, a party member points out, only for something to happen that didn't happen the previous time they were in this situation. It's not like those movies, apparently, and as a result, there is a degree of discovery and surprise to what might seem to be a familiar setup.

The screenwriters and director David F. Sandberg inject this with a lot of wicked humor, mostly to do with the real uncertainty of how this story will proceed—and reset and proceed again—and the genuine shock of some of these scenarios, as well as a few of the grisly deaths of these characters. One of them is so sudden and unexpected that to even hint at the means of that demise would be unfair.

Sure, all of this is essentially constructing a story around a series of surprises and gruesome deaths, but the very structure of the plot plays into that notion. The movie may be little more than a cheap machine for creating scares and jokes, but the filmmakers know that's the point and embrace it fully.

Their self-awareness is on display from the start, when a young woman (played by Maia Mitchell) nearly escapes a masked slasher and pleads with the silent killer that she doesn't want to die again. Immediately after, we're introduced to yet another common cliché, as the woman's sister Clover (Ella Rubin) has gathered a group of her closest friends to follow the sister's trail before her disappearance a year prior. The friends are completely the typical sorts we'd expect in this kind of movie: Clover's still-pining ex-boyfriend Max (Michael Cimino), the semi-psychic Megan (Ji-young Yoo), the sarcastic and cynical Nina (Odessa A'zion), and Nina's muscular and not-too-bright current boyfriend Abe (Belmont Cameli).

The sister's video messages and a helpful gas station attendant (played by Peter Stormare, who was also in the video game) lead the group to a visitor's center in the middle of nowhere. It's also, somehow, in a calm center of a raging storm, and as the friends realize that the sister and a number of other people came to this place and subsequently went missing, that's when the masked killer arrives.

That slasher, who wields a sledgehammer and brushes off any attack the group throws at him, is just the start, though. Yes, he kills them all, which would seem to be the quick end of a horror story, but after the last one of the friends dies, all of them re-awaken, still showing cuts and bruises on their bodies from the killer's attacks, and realize they're right back where and, more importantly, when the terror started.

Eventually, they figure out the rules, which amount to needing to survive until dawn in order to escape this chronological cycle. If they don't live through the night, they'll become "a part of it." That bit of exposition, by the way, is offered by a creepy witch, whose dark and decrepit cabin mysteriously appears across from the visitor's center on the group's second go-around at trying to survive. The film will eventually introduce a few other threats, including monstrous beasts and that one thing that shouldn't be mentioned, and locations, mainly within the unexpectedly roomy welcome center but also throughout a subterranean system of tunnels from what this place used to be.

The experience of the film is less a story, with hard internal logic (It holds up well enough, perhaps, for the little thinking it allows us to do) and actual characters (They're intentionally archetypes but at least smart enough to understand the game they're in), and more equivalent to a ride. Sandberg makes the whole thing about momentum, only relenting in giving us new variations of the repeated setup to explain the basics of that setup, and turning each iteration of the night into a sequence that both stands on its own and plays with the running joke of providing as much variety of clichés as possible.

These filmmakers are in on that joke, obviously (A late montage of some of the group's failures shows that Sandberg also knows when the gag could be getting stale), so any of the most apparent shortcomings of Until Dawn almost feel like part of the point, too. Here's a film that doesn't possess any higher ambitions than to run and play with a simple gimmick as far and long as it can, and the film meets those goals exactly where it needs to, with bloody gusto and demented humor to boot.

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