I went into Until Dawn with mixed expectations. As a fan of the original PlayStation game, I was curious to see how they'd adapt the interactive horror experience to film. What I got was something completely different from what I expected.
The story follows Clover and her friends heading to Glore Valley to investigate her missing sister Melanie's disappearance. They visit a creepy gas station where Melanie was last seen and meet Dr. Hill, played by Peter Stormare returning from the game. He warns them about dangers ahead, but they ignore him and continue to the Glore Valley visitor center.
Things get weird fast. There's rain that only falls in this valley, a guestbook that updates itself, and missing person posters everywhere. Then a masked killer with a pickaxe starts hunting them down. Standard horror movie stuff, until everyone suddenly wakes up. It's a time loop. They have thirteen cycles to figure out what's happening or they're stuck forever.
Each loop reveals new horrors. Friends get possessed, there are Wendigo monsters, people explode from drinking cursed water, and Dr. Hill is running psychological experiments on them. The backstory involves mining disaster victims who became Wendigos through repeated deaths rather than cannibalism like in the game. Eventually, Clover has to watch her sister, now a Wendigo, get killed to break the curse. She kills Dr. Hill with the cursed water, everyone escapes, and the movie ends with a shot of the snowy cabin from the original game.
Ji-young Yoo as Megan was easily the best part of the movie. She had actual personality and screen presence while everyone else felt pretty flat. The movie seemed to enjoy putting her through hell with multiple brutal deaths. The other characters were forgettable, especially Max who just spent most of the time yelling "Clover!"
The practical effects were really good. The gore was creative and intense, without being too over the top. There were genuine scares and the atmosphere stayed tense throughout. The movie definitely knows how to do horror right on a technical level.
But here's the problem: this barely feels like an Until Dawn movie. The Wendigos from the game were these terrifying, fast creatures that couldn't see you if you stayed still. Here they're just generic zombie like monsters. The whole point of the original was consequences and permanent death. When death just resets everything in a time loop, where are the stakes?
The time loop concept contradicts everything the game stood for. Until Dawn was about choices mattering and living with consequences. This movie throws that out the window. It felt like they took the name and some surface elements but ignored what made the source material special.
A lot of the lore didn't make sense either. Why thirteen loops specifically? How does the reset work? Why do characters sometimes remember things between loops and sometimes not? The rules felt inconsistent and poorly explained.
Peter Stormare returning as Dr. Hill should have been great, but they completely changed the character. In the game, he was this mysterious therapist figure. Here he's just a villain conducting experiments. It felt like they missed the point of who he was supposed to be.
That ending with the cabin tease was frustrating. It felt like the movie saying "Here's what you actually wanted to see, but you're not getting it." After sitting through a story that barely resembled Until Dawn, it was almost insulting.
As a standalone horror movie, it's decent. It has energy and creativity, and if you don't care about the video game connection, you might enjoy it. The meta humor works and the deaths are creative. But calling it Until Dawn, feels like false advertising.
I kept thinking about what this could have been if they had actually adapted the game properly. Imagine a movie where small choices create big consequences, or where the butterfly effect drives the plot. That would have been something special and unique.
Instead, we got a competent but disappointing horror movie that happens to share a name with a great video game. It's not terrible, but it's not great either. It succeeds as a generic horror film but completely fails as an adaptation.
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