Until Dawn

by Mike McGranaghan

It’s always a little daunting to walk into a movie that’s based on a video game. So many of them over the years have been terrible, and that’s putting it kindly. Today’s games are heavily inspired by movies, as they strive to achieve a cinematic quality in their visuals and cut scenes. Still, you can never get around the fact that video games and films have entirely different end goals, which is why transferring a property from a console system to the big screen often ends in failure. Until Dawn is a very pleasant surprise that totally works as a feature, regardless of whether you’ve played the game or even know it exists.

Clover (Ella Rubin) has been despondent since her sister Melanie disappeared a year ago. Together with four friends – Max (Michael Cimino), Megan (Ji-young Yoo), Nina (Odessa A’zion), and Abe (Belmont Cameli) – she makes a trip to Melanie’s last known whereabouts in search of answers. The group finds itself at the abandoned welcome center of a small town. They’re promptly murdered by a masked psycho dwelling inside. But then the hourglass on the wall turns upside down and the night repeats itself. Clover and pals are stuck in a time loop, forced to face a different kind of deadly peril every night until they run out of lives or figure out how to make it to morning.

Someone dies every couple of minutes in Until Dawn. It’s like Groundhog Day as reimagined by the Grim Reaper. In fact, this is one of the goriest horror movies to come down the pike in the past few years. The characters expire repeatedly in nightmarish ways, including throat slitting, disembowelment, and hemicorporectomy. (Google it.) Most gruesome of all is what happens to them after they share a glass of water. You can discover that one on your own. The movie utilizes top-notch practical effects to achieve these deaths, giving them the kind of old-school impact that horror fans actively sought out in 1980s grindhouse fare.

Director David F. Sandberg (Lights Out) sets a nervous, edgy mood and stages several outstanding jump scares. He also knows how to create an appropriate pace, hitting the gas at just the right times and taking a quick breather for a moment of macabre humor at others. Sandberg’s production team has assembled a series of extremely ominous sets for the actors to run around in. The director makes good use of them, so that it feels as though danger is lurking in every corner.

Fright films of this nature tend to fall apart when it comes to characterization. The people are less developed than the scary stuff. That’s the case here, too. The screenplay doesn’t spend much time giving dimension to Clover and the gang. At least Sandberg had the forethought to cast actors who exude personality. They fill in their characters’ gaps. Peter Stormare has a supporting role as a sinister man who has the answers to the time loop situation. With only a short amount of screen time, he gives a wonderfully unhinged performance that’s the icing on the movie’s gory cake.

Until Dawn is exciting and frightening, with a breathless climax that absolutely rattles your nerves. The majority of video game-based movies waste time on fan service, making sure to squeeze in everything players expect to see. This one tells an actual story and carefully crafts its sequences of terror. That alone makes it a cut above the rest.

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