Maybe Next Time
After a few decent films and series, ‘Until Dawn’ reminds us what videogame adaptations are actually like.
Until Dawn
Director: David F Sandberg • Writers: Gary Dauberman, Blair Butler, based on the PlayStation game
Starring: Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion, Ji-young Yoo, Peter Stormare
USA • 1hr 43mins
Opens Hong Kong April 24 • III
Grade: C
Full disclosure: I have not played the game of Until Dawn. But from what I know about it, it’s a multiple choice type game that gives players repeated chances to go back to the beginning, as it were, for a do-over and see if your player can survive the night. Fine. Until Dawn the movie, is less Bandersnatch and more hokey time travel conceit, designed to let the filmmakers – Swedish director David F Sandberg, who delivered gems like Lights Out, the not terriblle Shazam! and the actually terrible Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and writers Gary Dauberman (It: Chapter Two and the surprising Swamp Thing series for defunct streamer DC Universe) – have it all ways by using a time loop device better suited to Star Trek. Until Dawn is a movie powered almost exclusively by jump scares that push its deeply stupid characters into the required directions in order to get to the next… level? Kill box? Discovery? Who fuckin’ cares? Until Dawn’s scattered script changes the rules of the game from one minute to the next and from one space to the next – with no connetive tissue to explain these changes, by the way – until these five idiots come out in the daylight and… win the game? Again. Who cares?
Then there were… 5?
The originial story here revolves around Clover (Ella Rubin, Anora), on a road trip of some sort in the wake of her sister Mel’s (Maia Mitchell) devastating disappearance. Clover has tried to commit suicide twice since Mel vanished, and her friends are hoping that a trip retracing Mel’s steps will help Clover “get over it.” Counted among these friends are Clover’s torch-carrying ex-boyfriend Max (Michael Cimino), her hipster-ish bestie Nina (Odessa A’zion) and Nina’s opposites attract brah beauhunk Abel (Belmont Cameli), and the resident psychic Megan (Ji-young Yoo, Expats). On their drive they stop at a gas station straight out of Deliverance, where Peter Stormare, who was in the game, is the creepy attendant. He claims to have seen Mel and sends them on their way through what’s obviously a spatial anomaly and right into a house of horrors they can’t get out of. The find 1) a guest book, 2) an evidence wall of missing persons notices and 3) an hourglass. The Moronic Five are immediately murdered, the hourglass flips over, trips a time loop and restarts the night. The game? Either way, these asshats find themselves battling an array of cliché nightmare fodder again and again: a psychotic slashy clown, a Wendigo, a ceiling-based long-legged creature, a toothy demon thingy.
It’s possible there’s a string of in-jokes, references and Easter eggs lining the walls for gamers, and if that’s the case then godspeed. Hopefully you’ll get more out of Until Dawn than the rest of us will. If not I don’t know what to say. Derivative and a little sloppy (this one is super-cheap), this is essentially Escape Room if that nonsense had a repetition factor. There’s a nugget of solid B horror nuttiness buried deep in script that, despite its dull as dishwater characters – that are painfully dumb, did I mention that? – manages a few creative, practical looking kills. That tap water human combustion is truly awesome. But even then, after the first shock it just gets tired, especially in the vacuum of WTF is going on? Not only do Dauberman and Butler jettison internal logic, they throw down a third act reveal that just inspires eye-rolling if you’re still looking at the requisite otherworldly blue wash and dark corners and doors that dominate the images. Forgiving horror hounds may look past the foolery and the stilted dialogue (Megan gets a classic “It feels like something’s wrong” or some such) to revel in the gore, but even that’s a bit tame given the madness that could have come from Cat III/R freedom.