When I first heard about the Until Dawn movie, I have to admit, I had my doubts.
Not that I heard about it till about fifteen minutes before it got its cinematic release, for some reason, as the advertising campaign seems intent on burying this adaptation of the 2015 video game of the same name as far underground as possible. But when I did, I couldn’t help but furrow my brow a little, because – well, Until Dawn is a great game because it takes the well-worn tropes of a teen monster movie and puts you, the player, at the helm of it. Take away that interactive element, and you’re just left with nothing but the tropes, right?
That’s what I expected when I headed in to David F Sandberg’s version of the game, released last week after a near-deafeningly silent marketing run. But, while the movie might look on the surface like a rehash of the game – a group of teens, led by Clover (Ella Rubin), head to the location Clover’s sister vanished from the year before, only to find themselves stalked by a masked killer and sinister creatures – Until Dawn, the movie, finds some interesting ways to make a case for its own existence.
If the Until Dawn game is an experiment in taking the tropes of the horror movie medium and applying them to gaming, the Until Dawn movie is the same thing in reverse – an attempt to take the experience of playing a video game and turn it into a movie. The film revolves around the central characters reliving the same night over and over again until they can find a way to escape, returned back to their “save point” when they’re all dead to use their newfound information to make a more educated guess at breaking free.
And what this functionally provides is a chance for Sandberg and company to make a dozen tiny horror films within this single premise. It seems like this approach has been received with pretty mixed reviews by both audiences and critics, and I get it, I do – the only single throughline is Peter Stromare hamming it up to the high heavens to cover up for the fact there are some serious holes in the overall premise, along with a bare-bones missing-sister plot – but, as someone who loves horror in all its forms, it feels like a chance to play in the sandbox of a stack of different genres at once.
From supernatural thrills to stalk-and-slash classics, from exploding buckets of gore to witches hiding in dilapidated houses, there’s hardly a corner of the genre that doesn’t get a showing here, sometimes with some decent style to boot. The cast has pretty good chemistry (and I have now finally forgiven Odessa A’Zion for her dreadful turn in Hellraiser) and the script a decent sense of humour to keep things from getting too serious. Sandberg has a few brilliant setpieces and gorgeous set designs – the small town swallowed by the earth was particularly striking, to the point I wish we had seen more of it – this generally feels like a love letter to the genre as much as the game did.
And, while it doesn’t directly adapt the main story or characters of the game (while the criticism for the use of wendigos still remains), there’s enough in the way of references and inside jokes to make it feel like a fond nod rather than a hollow cash-in. I can entirely see why this has been a movie a lot of people have hated, given the odd attempt to adapt the mechanics of gaming to the screen, but, for me, Until Dawn is a worthy companion piece to the game.
If you’re a fan of the game, where did this movie rank up against it for you? Did you go in with no knowledge of the adaptation? I would love to hear what you make of this film in the comments below! If you enjoyed this article and want to see more stuff like it, please consider supporting us on Ko-Fi. You can check out more of my work on my personal blog, The Cutprice Guignol!
By Lou MacGregor
(header image via IGN)
No But Listen 