Until Dawn (2025) – Glitchy

Released: 25th April
Seen: 3rd October

In 2015, the video game Until Dawn was released on PlayStation. It was a major hit almost instantly, the game being mostly story based, where the player would have to essentially keep a cabin full of teenagers alive for a single night while assorted creatures tried to kill them. The central gimmick of the game was a system that allowed the players choices to make a difference in the ending (AKA you pick up a certain book and it might lead to a specific character living that would die in any other playthrough), It was enough of a hit that it spawned a few spin offs and even recently got a full remake for the newest console. It’s the kind of game that was pretty much destined to get a film adaptation at some point and now it has one, it just doesn’t work like you would hope.

Until Dawn follows Clover (Ella Rubin) and her friends Max (Michael Cimino), Nina (Odessa A’zion), Megan (Ji-young Yoo) and Abe (Belmont Cameli), who have all hit the road in search of Clover’s sister Melanie, who recently went missing. Circumstances force them to take shelter on the way at a visitor centre in Glore Valley, where they are promptly murdered by a masked killer. They then proceed to restart their evening and get killed by something else, eventually learning that every time they die, they’re returned to a specific point in the night (except that one time when they aren’t) and have to try and survive whatever random new thing wants to try and kill them. If they survive until dawn, they can go free, but if not, the evening will keep resetting until eventually the reset button gets tired and stops working, because having a limited number of resets is needed to create tension. 

What quickly becomes clear is that the movie adaptation of Until Dawn is using a time loop to represent the idea of different playthroughs of the game having different outcomes based upon the player choice and on first glance this is an interesting way to tackle that mechanic. However, the longer the film goes on the less this idea works because the characters choices don’t really make any tangible impact, new weird shit happens because they reset the day and that’s it. A masked killer might be the villain on the first go round, then it’s wendigos, then it’s killer tap water that makes you explode, the film chooses to take imagery from the games and just use it haphazardly because it is trying to fit way too many ideas in. 

This inability for Until Dawn to really stick to one idea makes it very hard to follow, the rules that the film is abiding by seem to change on a whim. Am I watching a slasher film or a werewolf film or a possession film? It seems like all of them at random points but all those films have different expectations from the audience so the whiplash kind of forces the audience to tune it out. It doesn’t help that the time loop mechanic that the entire film works on is just kind of a mess, it resets to a particular point where the characters are already in the middle of doing something else, except towards the end when it seems to send them to a completely different point in time and the idea of what this film considers ‘dawn’ is also pretty messy… It’s just a jumbled mess in terms of story construction, good luck trying to work out how this weird shit operates. Normally, I would scream how it doesn’t matter, it’s a device meant to help the narrative and doesn’t need a great explanation but here it’s so central to the narrative and is so loosely used that it’s distracting.

What also doesn’t help is that the characters we’re watching are just not that likable. I’m sure we’re meant to like them, Until Dawn wants us to root for all of them to live but it’s kind of hard when they’re literally murdering each other or lying about pretty serious-looking injuries. These are characters who we’re meant to want to see live through the night and I don’t think they want each other to make it through sometimes. It’s not a fun dynamic to watch and the more that the nights reset the more you end up hoping that maybe some of the worse friends won’t come back, which is not what I should be feeling about these people.

Now, this isn’t to say everything about Until Dawn is bad because some parts are actually good. Visually, it’s quite impressive what they accomplished, some of the shots are really creative and there’s a clear use of practical effects that are very well done and viscerally shocking. You can really feel that there is a lot of love for horror going on here, the film is clearly trying to pay homage to as much of the genre as it can and visually, it does a good job of this. There’s a very specific skill to making a lot of these visuals work as well as they do and it’s nice to see it all done well here… just a pity that this is another entry in one of my least favourite tropes, “Nice video, shame about the song”.

Until Dawn had some good ideas… too many of them, that’s the problem. It’s a film that doesn’t know when enough is enough and overstuffs itself to the point of nausea. Its ideas are not well explained or explored, whatever rules it does have are pretty much ignored whenever the hell the film wants to ignore them and, perhaps most upsettingly, it just never feels like the characters choices make any real tangible difference to the situation they find themselves in. Until Dawn was always going to be a hard game to adapt and the way they tried to work around its core mechanic had a slim chance of working, but it doesn’t and just created a film that’s kind of a mess in a way that’s not particularly worth thinking about.