Until Dawn (2025): Utterly Bland and Weightless

The Until Dawn movie is an unfortunate reminder of a time when video game adaptations were expected to be bad. The game itself received reasonably strong reviews upon its 2015 release, praised for its time-loop premise, worldbuilding, and cast performances, and the last of those makes for an ironic distinction between the game and the movie based on it. The only thing flatter than the emotional depth of this film adaptation's characters is the performances of the actors who portray them, all of which are about as interesting as an unskippable 15-second YouTube ad. The fact that death is so temporary in this movie also doesn't give the filmmakers very many reasons to invest in their characters while they're still alive, though I'd argue that you don't need a good reason to make a character interesting.

Apart from one satisfying and logistically sound twist in its final act, there's almost nothing good to say about this movie. I understand it being relatively limited by its source material, but there is virtually zero risk for any of the characters involved here, not that their deaths would deprive humanity of some deep insight into our nature. Basically, in the world of Until Dawn, if you die, you just reappear - respawn - back where all of this began for you. Bafflingly, the movie mostly decides to try to work around this premise rather than with it. Its characters are trying to find Melanie, who is both the little sister of one of their group members and the latest person to go missing in the area near Glore Valley. In all brutal honesty, they won't find anything of value here, and certainly not a person with real feelings like fear, happiness, hatred, or love. 

Horror movies should inspire fear in us, but because Until Dawn rests so much of its thematic weight on shallow characters, it's hard to care about their survival, especially since this movie's time loop eliminates much of the weight of their deaths, even if it does come up with last-ditch reasons for why dying is still problematic; that would be a crazy thing to say in any other context. The bland acting robs the characters of any emotional sway they may have otherwise had over us, even if their lives do get fleetingly fleshed out for us as the movie drags on in a way that makes me wonder why we didn't get to learn some of these things about them sooner. The damage is already done, and the half-hearted attempts of Until Dawn to flesh out its characters don’t do enough to help them outrun killers, choppy acting, or half-baked characterization cliches.

The acting in this movie is incredibly flat. All of the actors adopt this uninspiringly monotone voice that lacks any pitch, one that never rises to a shriek, falls to a growl, or moves in either direction in any meaningful way. The characters themselves are indistinguishable from each other, and Until Dawn rarely, if ever, puts meaningful effort into helping them escape the rut of lifeless monotony they fall into. There is also a polished feel to this movie's visuals that makes it seem way too clean, like you're watching a music video. The vibrant color grading is admittedly fun to look at, and on a lot of levels, I actually appreciate this movie for not adhering to that generic "muted" look that so many horror movies go for, but on others, the visuals of Until Dawn call attention to themselves in an incredibly emotionally disruptive way. Watching it is like watching someone record a supernatural serial killer, sell the footage to a candy factory's marketing wing, and dare them to turn it into something. 

This is a subpar slasher movie trying to keep pace with and copy other slashers, but it doesn't understand what makes a good slasher movie good. It adheres almost religiously to all the tired tropes of bad ones, crafting characters that exist for one reason and one reason alone: to act as cannon fodder for a killer that is unforgivably forgettable in the grand scheme of other masked murderers. Its time-loop premise is left thematically untapped and relegated to the role of a party trick rather than something that could have been used to explore some truly intriguing ideas, like Inception and especially Edge of Tomorrow dared to. The failures of this film are not merely a catalog of unrelated weaknesses that gradually wear it down. No, the problems here are systemic, and they feed off and reinforce one another. The fact that dying means almost nothing in this movie gives the people who made it almost no reason to care about the characters while they’re still alive. 

Until Dawn places undue weight on the shoulders of characters already overshadowed by the ones in the game, and this movie, which can't figure out how to bring its own high-concept premise to bear, crumbles alongside them. Its poorly managed premise ends up robbing death of much of its weight and impact when it could have been used to explore the idea instead, and the entire movie reeks of the touch of a filmmaker who didn't understand what made the game his film is based on so special. This movie is at war with itself thematically, and it struggles to clarify exactly what it wants its confused identity to be, especially as its original ideas begin to reveal themselves to be shallow vessels incapable of holding the amount of water the movie needs them to. What starts as a dribble of incompetence quickly turns into cracks, then rivers, and finally a shallow sea of vanilla that proves video game adaptations can still be bad. 

Until Dawn - 3/10

Psalm 90:1-4