'Until Dawn' review: A friend group needs someone to give them a daybreak

Sony Pictures

Only one question remains. Are you able to survive Until Dawn? Based on the video game of the same name, this survival horror invites us to join a group of twentysomethings—Clover (Ella Rubin), Max (Michael Cimino), Nina (Odessa A'zion), Megan (Ji-Young Soo) and Abe (Belmont Cameli)—on a road trip as they are looking into the disappearance of Clover's sister Melanie (Maia Mitchell), arriving at a rural gas station which is her last known location. The gas station's owner (Peter Stormare) points the group towards a place called Glore Valley, which is infamous for disappearances. However, terrible weather forces them to stop at a visitor centre that is mystically surrounded by a wall of rain, and shortly after they're hunted by a killer, before learning that their deaths lead them straight back to the beginning of the night. As it turns out, getting out of this deathly loop will probably require them to survive the night.

What really acts as the one true scare in this film adaptation is most of its first act since we get off to a rocky start. The word on the street is that the movie is rather dissimilar to the game (I haven't played it as you can tell), and that might be why Blair Butler and Gary Dauberman, the writers credited for both the script and story for some reason, struggle to get the story engine going. You get an awful lot of odd exposition, people constantly yelling names, and "Are you okay?" type of dialogue, which unfortunately persists for the entire 100-minute runtime. Butler and Dauberman put slightly more effort into their characters, who are somewhat well distinguished and therefore you're not necessarily rooting for them to die, but the screenplay's curiosity regarding central themes like grief, love and friendship is swallowed by the lack of personality.

But if you're dying for some good news, you'll be happy to learn that Until Dawn finds a heartbeat once the characters stop yapping nonstop and director David F. Sandberg grabs the wheel with both hands and drives the project towards the horrors. When the story becomes strictly about survival and working together to find a way out, there's a fair amount of silly, gooey and changeful fun to be discovered under the creaky floorboards, with just enough character depth to make it mean something as well. You can sense when Sandberg and his collaborators—including his cast who are all delivering decent performances—are having a ball with the way that the premise allows them to tap into different killer narratives as each night is designed to change things up and keep the characters, as well as the viewers, on their toes.

Cinematographer Maxime Alexandre's dingy lighting mixed with digital photography interferes with your enjoyment of bloody kills and chaos at times, but there's enough energy in the madness for the film to never overstay its welcome at the visitor centre, much thanks to editor Michel Aller who understands the importance of patient build-ups and tempo changes when it comes to controlling tension in these sorts of movies. What you end up getting is a neat, a bit too insipid and mostly competent horror tale. It won't set the world on fire, but it's a fine option as a first R-rated experience for someone dipping their toes into the genre pool.

Smileys: Premise, editing

Frowneys: Dialogue

You want to kill me and my friends? Clover my dead body, buddy.

3.0/5

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