For decades, the phrase “video game movie” was synonymous with trash, thanks to critically loathed adaptations of games like Street Fighter, Silent Hill, and (the unfairly underrated) Super Mario Bros. But over the past few years, Hollywood has seen audiences embrace a new animated Super Mario Bros. Movie, three Sonic the Hedgehog movies, a prestige drama series based on The Last of Us, and The Minecraft Movie, which has teens going wild, tossing popcorn, and shouting catchphrases in the theaters.
With enthusiasm for video game adaptations at an all-time high, there should be no better moment for a movie version of Until Dawn to hit theaters. Even the critically panned Five Nights At Freddy’s scored enough box office bank to merit a sequel. However, the filmmakers of Until Dawn face a unique challenge, as this game’s whole jam was putting players in the shoes of teens being stalked by a merciless slasher. To merely transpose the story written by Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick could risk feeling too similar to other horror movies, but moreover would potentially miss out on the game’s most addictive element.
Rather than just replaying a level, the game uses a specific mechanism tied to the butterfly effect, positing that different choices mean different outcomes for the characters. Throughout the game, players are given the opportunity to make key decisions that could change their characters’ fate, as signified by an onscreen butterfly effect screen; after making the decision, the game auto-saves, making it endlessly replayable. (Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch would make a similar game a few years later, allowing audiences to choose-your-adventure the fate of the spinoff movie’s tormented hero.)
But how could a movie reasonably bring that dynamic into theaters, where no controller would hand over choices to the audience? In Until Dawn, the filmmakers employ an enticing dynamic that aims to mirror gameplay while rejecting the tropes associated with its sci-fi subgenre.
Until Dawn brings a time loop into a familiar story.
Ella Rubin stars as Clover, a girl in search of her sister, in “Until Dawn.”
Credit: Kerry Brown / Sony Pictures Entertainment
At a glance, screenwriters Blair Butler and Gary Dauberman shed much of the game’s materials. Gone are the high school archetypes of jock, nerd, mean girl, jealous boyfriend, and bullied misfit, which allowed players to get a quick read on the characters. In their place is a smaller group of friends who don’t easily fall into stock characters. And they aren’t reuniting for a weekend getaway, as was the premise of the game. Instead, Clover (Ella Rubin), her childhood besties Nina (Odessa A’zion) and Megan (Ji-young Yoo), her ex-boyfriend Max (Michael Cimino), and Nina’s new boyfriend Abe (Belmont Cameli) are on an uncomfortable road trip, searching for Clover’s sister Melanie, who went missing a year before.
Their search brings them to the ominously named Glore Valley, where a welcome center becomes a temporal trap, pitching them into a time loop that is determined to kill them all before dawn.
Once within the grips of Glore Valley, Clover and her friends are doomed to repeat the night, running from a rampaging killer, dodging monsters that prowl the adjacent forest, and generally trying not to die. Every time they do, they end up back where they started, forced to face the night again. Each time (like in the time-loop slasher Happy Death Day), their bodies are bruised and battered from the night before. The only way out is through, meaning they either survive until dawn to break whatever curse this is or they become a part of it, doomed to terrorize the next unlucky tourist to approach the welcome center’s guest book.
Mashable Top Stories
The game dynamics are smartly translated… until they’re not.
Credit: Kerry Brown / Sony Pictures Entertainment
At first, the time loop seems a clever way to bring an element of the original gameplay into the theater. In a lot of video games, the character dies and gets bumped back to the beginning of the level (or save point), and the player uses what they learned from this failure to get further the next time. A similar device was used in The Edge of Tomorrow, though that Tom Cruise action epic was not based on a video game.
There’s just two problems with this time-loop device in the movie Until Dawn. For one thing, that’s not how the game worked. If a character bit it, the game’s plot moves on to another character, and you play either until they’re all dead or you make it to dawn. Sure, players could go back to the chapters before they played out that timeline. But how it plays in the movie is not as a choice; it’s just do or die.
The other, bigger issue is that the movie gives up on this device partway through, and for no apparent reason. At first, when Clover and her friends realize they’re in a time loop, they decide to create a strategy to help them all survive. Like in the game, they begin to gather clues and even a literal key as they make their way into Glore Valley’s grim lore and horrifying landscape of sunken houses, a dilapidated sanatorium, and collapsed mines infested with monsters. However, as the film nears the third act, this plan of exploring and working together is abruptly abandoned. It’s not for any character-motivated reasoning, like tensions growing as the toll of repeated deaths weighs on their psyches. It’s because they abruptly discover they can no longer remember the events from one night to the next, and all of a sudden — after a grimly comical montage of mayhem — they’re on their last night.
Even the time loop collapses early, with the screenwriters treating each night not as a new opportunity to provide a fresh twist on their established loop, but a chance to haphazardly dip into horror tropes. In one moment, the teens are fleeing a masked murderer, and in the next they’re escaping creatures from the game, then battling a witch or some very explosive food poisoning. The characters lampshade this development by commenting that what they’re going through is “not like those movies.” But those movies were often using the familiar framework to catch the audience off guard with new twists as they incorrectly anticipate what comes next. By abandoning this path, Until Dawn becomes unmoored.
Until Dawn is a horror smorgasbord that’s just not satisfying.
Ella Rubin and Peter Stormare come face-to-face in “Until Dawn.”
Credit: Kerry Brown / Sony Pictures Entertainment
Director David F. Sandberg, whose previously helmed Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation, and the Shazam movies, has a clear enthusiasm for gore. He drags his heroes through muck, splashes them with blood, and even blows them to smithereens. The kills in Until Dawn are spectacularly gruesome, which may be enough to please some horror fans. Others may relish props and scares that clearly allude to such classics of the genre like Poltergeist with its creepy clown doll, or Mario Bava’s Shock and its uniquely harrowing hallway scare. But while Until Dawn offers a lot of intriguing bits of different kinds of horror movies, as a whole it’s a gloppy mess.
The problem begins with Clover and her crew, who are hastily sketched and defined chiefly as friends. Beyond that, one believes she’s psychic. One still pines for his ex. One has a boyfriend. Clover, beyond desperately seeking her sister, has no real character. So, watching them ping-pong from one nightmare to the next has no emotional weight. They have far less dimension than the game characters, whose flaws and virtues are unfurled over the course of hours and hours of gameplay. The movie’s heroes feel less flesh and blood, despite being live-action and despite their actual flesh and blood being ripped to shreds before our very eyes.
Beyond that, the plotline becomes a tangle of ideas that leans on the surreal as a crutch that can’t support it. It’s a pleasure to see the return of Peter Stormare, the only actor who made the leap from the video game to the movie. But even his role feels slapped in, as if the final act of the film was hastily rewritten or reshot in a frenzy. Overall, the heaping-on of various disparate horror elements makes Until Dawn feel like a malformed anthology, offering the iconography without the connective tissue to make it truly scary.
This mishandling makes for a finale that is far less frightening than it is frustrating, because it is just inexplicable. The rules of this world (or game) become less and less clear as the sands run through the hourglass. In the end, Until Dawn’s ties to its source material are so sparse that it is less a bad movie adaption of a video game and more a generic, underwhelming horror flick.
Until Dawn opens in theaters April 25.
