Until Dawn (2025)

With twenty minutes left, I was so bored, I went to read reviews while it plays out. I already opted to go to sleep less than halfway through last night, as I realized it wasn't going to be scary at all. It's beautifuly shot, and fairly mastered, though way too dark (Hollywood doesn't know how to do HDR, so everything looks like shit from them these days), and it has that Odessa actress, that's so hot. It's just boring, not scary, the story is poorly told, and the pacing odd and events seem jumbled. Shortly before leaving to read reviews, I was thinking, "This should've been a game. I think I'd like to play that." And now I'm told it WAS a game. So I think I'll go play that.

"Until Dawn" is what I call "Scoobie Do" for adults. There's a group of pals, out for a vacation romp, who find themselves facing a mysterious back story and lots of supernatural baddies, out to croak them, in bloody style. What makes this even worse than the usual formulaic, survivalist, horror nonsense, is its story is based upon a time loop. So, in essence, this is a horror flick, with obsessive compulsive disorder. The murder and mayhem repeats itself, stripping away even the basic sense of the unknown, as we stop wondering and worrying over, who is going to die and when. I can see how this would work in the context of a video game, which this film, is based upon. In games players die over and over, until they finally find a way to beat the game. As a film, its not a great idea, at all. A sense of lethargy and boredom sets in, as everyone dies over and over again. Without sounding too negative, there is a limited upside. The initial atmosphere of dread is well established, creature effects are reasonable, as is acting, from the cast. The deaths are varied too, so its not wholly a case of deja vu. In summary, a basic watch that breaks the first rule of survivalist horror, with everyone dying, repeatedly. In turn, the sense of urgency and threat is dissipated, leading to a somewhat tedious, fundamentally repetitive, watch.

Sadly, there really isn’t much new to say about this derivative horror film. It’s the usual bunch of friends in the car routine, only this time it’s a woman-hunt they are on. You see, “Melanie” whom we very briefly meet at the start - has gone missing and so her sister “Clover” (Ella Rubin) has recruited her ex “Max” (Michael Cimino), best pal “Nina” (Odessa A’zion) and her new boyfriend “Abe” (Belmont Cameli) and the slightly spiritual “Megan” (Ji-young Yoo) to try to find out what happened. As the song goes: “if you go into the woods tonight, you’re in for a big surprise…” and so dodgy and ill-conceived decisions galore now ensue as the usual set-piece housebound horror kicks in and the story sort of lurches around like a gory version of “Groundhog Day”. The acting and writing vie for the award for being the blandest - especially the shockingly wooden Cameli, and the whole thing recycles itself to the point where I was quickly on the side of the perpetrator of these dastardly goings-on. What’s more annoying is that the plot did have some potential; it could have been better had the director relied less on the tried and tested formulae and taken a few risks with the story. As it is, his only risk was to engage a forgettable cast and leave us with an halfway house between the mystic and the makeshift. It’s an adequate summer release, but not in the least scary nor memorable.