April 24, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by David F. Sandberg
Culture Representation: Taking place in the fictional town of Glore Valley, Pennsylvania, the horror film “Until Dawn” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with one Asian person and one multiracial person) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: Five young people go searching for the missing sister of one of the group members when they find themselves trapped in a haunted house, where they are killed and revived and can only escape if they survive until dawn.
Culture Audience: “Until Dawn” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the “Until Dawn” video game and mediocre-to-bad horror movies.
The horror film “Until Dawn” starts off as suspenseful but goes downhill into being a gory and repetitive bloodbath with a weak ending. This story (about young people stuck in a loop of being murdered and revived) has minimal connections to the video game. Considering all the possiblities for the “Until Dawn” movie to be a cinematic step forward from the video game, it’s disappointing that the “Until Dawn” movie ends up relying on the same old slasher film clichés.
Directed by David F. Sandberg, “Until Dawn” was written by Blair Butler and Gary Dauberman. The movie is based loosely on the “Until Dawn” horror video game, which has the same “survive the night” concept, with players of the video game choosing from numerous possibilities for various scenarios. People don’t need to know anything about the “Until Dawn” video game to see the movie.
These are the main similarities between the movie and the video game: One of the villains from the video game is a character in the movie and is played by the same actor. There are creatures running around called wendigos. There’s a backstory about a psychiatric facility and a deadly mining disaster.
“Until Dawn” (which takes place in the fictional town of Glore Valley, Pennsylvania) begins by showing a woman in her 20s named Melanie Paul (played by Maia Mitchell) crawling out of a hole in a ground in a remote wooded area. (“Until Dawn” was actually filmed in Hungary.) She is quickly killed by an unidentified man (played by Tibor Szauervein), who’s wearing a mask that resembles the mask worn by serial killer Michael Myers in the “Halloween” movies. In “Until Dawn,” Melanie gets hacked to death with a machete.
The movie then fast-forwards to a year later. Five people, who are all in their early 20s, have gone on a road trip and arrived by Jeep to Glore Valley to look for Melanie, who has been missing for the past year. Based on a cell phone video that Melanie sent before she disappeared, Melanie was last seen at a gas station/convenience store in Glore Valley, which is an isolated town surrounded by woods.
These are the five travelers who end up getting trapped in a sinister place:
- Clover Paul (played by Ella Rubin), Melanie’s grieving younger sister, is the only one in group who thinks that Melanie could still be alive.
- Max (played by Michael Cimino), Clover’s ex-boyfriend, is sensitive and has unresolved feelings for Clover.
- Nina Riley (played by Odessa A’zion) is a tough-talking rebel who clashes with Max because Nina taunts Max about still being hung up on Clover, while Max taunts Nina about her most recent dating relationships lasting for only a few months.
- Abe (played by Belmont Cameli), Nina’s current boyfriend, is a university student who has a tendency to be an arrogant know-it-all (he likes to remind people he’s a majoring in psychology), and he wants to be the “alpha male” of the group.
- Megan (played by Ji-young Yoo) has psychic abilities and is the person in the group who does things like have the group members form a circle to do breathing exercises.
At the gas station/convenience store where Melanie was last seen, Clover shows a photo of Melanie to the creepy owner/manager (played by Peter Stromare), who’s behind the counter. He tells Clover that if Melanie is missing, she most likely went missing in the part of Glore Valley were other people have gone missing. He points in the direction of where it is.
The five travelers end up driving to what looks like a bed-and-breakfast house because there’s a Welcome Center sign outside. As soon as they get out of the Jeep, they notice that misty rain is surrounding them on all sides but only in a limited area around the house. Abe has been filming everything on his phone. And because this is a predictable horror movie that takes place in a remote area, you already know that the victims will be stuck in a place where they can’t get cell phone signals or any WiFi/Internet service.
When they go inside, they see the house is abandoned. (Or is it?) There’s a very large hourglass in the foyer. There’s also a guest book where Melanie’s signature is the last signature in the book. Her signature is written 13 times in a column, with each signature looking scragglier than the previous signature. This seems to be proof that Melanie was there, but where is she?
The five members of the group are then alarmed to see a bulletin board with several missing-person flyers tacked on to the board. The people in the flyers are of various ages. Melanie is on one of the flyers, but no one in the group made these flyers.
A lot of what happens next is already revealed in the trailers for “Until Dawn.” It’s enough to say that the masked murderer goes on a rampage, and the five vistors get killed. However, the five murder victims find out that every time the hourglass turns around, they are resurrected but have sustained certain injuries and have other changes to their bodies that they don’t understand. The trapped victims also see that they are now on missing-person flyers on the house’s bulletin board. When they try to leave the house, they still die in various ways.
A smaller run-down house suddenly appears from across the street from the main house. As if to make things too obvious, the smaller house has a door that’s spray-painted with the words “Fight the Glore Witch.” And sure enough, inside the house is the Glore Witch (played by Mariann Borbala Hermányi), who tells certain trapped characters that there’s only one way to leave: “Survive the night or become a part of it.”
“Until Dawn” can’t overcome a big plot hole that lingers throughout the movie like the stench of a rotten screenplay: When the five trapped people wake up, they repeatedly say they can’t remember anything. Some of them can’t remember how they previously died or how long they’ve been trapped. And yet, they somehow remember the “rule” of what they need to do to escape every time they are resurrected. This lack of consistency ultimately sinks the movie.
There’s also a scene where Abe remembers filming videos on his phone. When the group goes to look at the videos, it’s just a bunch of time-wasting, gross-out videos that show body infestations and infections. This scene just brings up a question that viewers might wonder about but the movie never answers: “Why can Abe show videos on his phone but they can’t use his phone to keep track of the time?” The jumbled timeline makes the movie very incoherent.
Meanwhile, “Until Dawn” devolves into a tedious splatterfest, as the movie becomes enamored with showing the characters’ bodies spontaenously exploding as ways for them to die instead of being murdered. The first few times an exploding body is shown, it’s effective. After the fifth time and beyond, it’s annoying. The acting performances in “Until Dawn” are very typical of horror movies where a bunch of young people are the targets of terror.
There are numerous chase scenes that are plagued with sloppy film editing. Why all of this terror is happening just becomes increasingly irrelevant by the time the movie comes to its atrocious end. And like all substandard horror movies that rely too much on over-used stereotypes, the end of the movie shows that the story could be continued—although the “Until Dawn” movie doesn’t leave enough intrigue at the end for most viewers to want a sequel.
Screen Gems will release “Until Dawn” in U.S. cinemas on April 25, 2025.
