Until Dawn (United States/Hungary, 2025)

Until Dawn is a gimmick movie – a production with just enough tantalizing moments to assemble an intriguing 3-minute trailer but not nearly enough to comprise a full-length feature. It’s technically based on a video game, although the connective strands are limited to a few thematic elements, the occasional Easter egg, and the presence of actor Peter Stormare. Like far too many game-to-film adaptations, the better option is to fire up the PS5 and stay far, far away from the multiplex.

The movie has a Groundhog Day meets Final Destination vibe but that’s more window dressing than anything else. The plot is largely irrelevant; the whole point of the movie is to watch the five main characters get repeatedly slaughtered before being resurrected to go through the whole thing again. Rinse and repeat. I’m not sure of the exact body count but it’s in the dozens. Most of the deaths are pretty routine: slashed throats, bludgeoned heads, stabbings. Admittedly, one can lay claim to a modicum of inventiveness – in which people drink water that causes them to explode – but that’s an exception.

The movie starts out with five friends – Clover (Ella Rubin), Max (Michael Cimino, not to be confused with the late director), Nina (Odessa A’zion), Megan (Ji-young Joo), and Abe (Belmont Cameli) – on a road trip to nowhere, looking for Clover’s missing sister Melanie (Maia Mitchell). A creepy old man at a road-stop general store, Dr. Hill (Peter Stormare), suggests where she might have gone, so the twentysomethings head up there, only to become trapped in a hellhole stuck in time. That’s when the killing starts, courtesy of a slasher-movie clown. Except, instead of staying dead, the victims come back to life, a little worse for the wear, when the sands in a mysterious hourglass run out and it flips over. The implication is that if they can stay alive until time expires, they might be able to escape alive.

A better movie might have made this into a hallucinogenic trip where we wonder whether this is really happening or whether it’s a bad acid trip. The movie is too underwritten to effectively perform such a narrative sleight-of-hand. It’s not interested in the details of the plot. It has a beginning point and an end point and all that matters in between is the pointless exercise of repeatedly killing the characters. Even that might not be so bad if there was some humor or invention in the process but the film is a dour affair, mostly stuck inside a shoddily designed haunted house, with plastic characters who have little backstory and less personality. It would be an insult to call them stereotypes – they don’t rise to that level. They are non-entities.

Of the five principal actors, I vaguely recognized two: Ella Rubin (who was in Anora) and Ji-young Joo (the Prime Video series Ex-Pats). Needless to say, both were better in those earlier projects. I’m not familiar with the other three, who are at least photogenic. The director, David F. Sandberg, is surprisingly not a first-timer. In fact, he has previously been in charge of some pretty high-profile fare (the two Shazam! movies).

Until Dawn presents itself as a mystery movie, with some great “truth” needing to be solved in order to allow the characters to get into their car and head back to the real world. We learn that they don’t have unlimited lives, so the clock is ticking. By the time the movie gets around to pulling back the curtain on what’s going on, I no longer much cared. That’s what happens when the characters are so plastic that even a scintilla of empathy is impossible. I can think of bad slasher sequels from the ‘80s that were more engaging than this one.

Until Dawn (United States/Hungary, 2025)