UNTIL DAWN (2025)

Video games have been a part of my life for longer than any other interest I’ve ever indulged in. It amazes me, even to this day, what can be done with coding, visual and audio direction, and a little bit of creativity. In this light, games are an art form, as they’re conceived, sketched, planned, built, and fine-tuned before their release to the public for all to gaze upon; however, what differentiates them from something like, let’s say, music, film, or painting is their level of interactivity and, in turn, how malleable they are.

Some games are designed strictly to test one’s reflexes, concentration, and memory, such as arcade classics like Ketsui, X-Men, or The Grid, yet these have little to no narrative to speak of. Then there are other games that focus on weaving a story wit deeper characterisations, creating an interactive novel or film when viewed under a certain light.

Sure, some game narratives are rather shallow and/or trite, like ones typically found in character action games and first-person shooters; however, there are genres of games that strictly hone in on creating an immersive experience through storytelling, the relationships between an ensemble of characters, and world-building, such as role-playing games, horror adventure games, and survival horror.

Then there are so-called interactive drama games, where the player is literally playing a movie, watching scene after scene and interacting in-between using selectable choices that alter the way the plot plays out. I remember when Until Dawn first dropped on the PlayStation 4 in 2015, and gamers loved it. It was the first interactive drama game that allowed so many of the story’s decisions to be changed, as similar games that came before it (Heavy Rain, The Walking Dead: A Telltale Games Series, Life is Strange), only allowed for so much narrative manipulation.

To promote the game’s immense level of malleability, the game explores the idea of the butterfly effect, which, for those unfamiliar, describes how a small change in a complex and multifaceted system’s starting conditions can lead to wildly different results. Literally any decision being made can lead to a character’s death, whether later in the game’s story or right around the corner, or how a character or characters end up at X or Y location.

Despite the criticisms I had with its narrative, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of Until Dawn, as it took the genre, mixed it with a horror narrative, and did something interesting with the age-old slasher template. So when news got out that Sony was doing a screen adaptation of the game, I was excited and curious at the same time.

How would Sony go about making a film based off a game that has more divergent paths than I can count? A game where, to see every possible scenario and conclusion, one would need to play for 200+ hours. And to understand the severity of this, it takes roughly five to seven hours to get through just one playthrough of Until Dawn, as the cutscenes aren’t skippable.

Would Sony create a poll for those who’ve played the game to vote on which scenario they’d like to see and create something based on public consensus? That would be an interesting way of doing it! However, to successfully adaptation the game via this approach, Until Dawn would work best as a TV miniseries due to its episodic nature; however, it’s possible to trim it down to a 120-minute runtime and focus more on the essential narrative beats while minimising characterisations and the relationships they have with others.

Well, Sony didn’t do this. Instead, they hired filmmaker David F. Sandberg, the man responsible for horror “hits” such as Lights Out (2016), Annabelle: Creation (2017), and everyone’s “favourite” superhero duology Shazam! (2019) and Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023), to direct and produce the movie. They also hired writer-director Gary Dauberman, the writer of It (2017), It Chapter Two (2019), Annabelle (2014), Annabelle: Creation, Annabelle Comes Home (2019), and The Nun (2018), to create the screenplay.

Until Dawn is an utter travesty of a film and an insult to the video game IP. This dynamic duo manages to create a screen adaptation of a popular video game that outright ignores the video game entirely. This begs the question: Why?

Despite my criticisms of the games’ original script, Sony had a script sitting there already; they just needed to hire someone to adapt it into feature-length, maybe even adjust certain areas of its story. However, they instead they hired someone to write a completely different movie from scratch. Why go through the trouble of hiring someone else to write a script for a film and then slap the title of a best-selling game on it? To sell it on name alone?

Was it cheaper for Sony to only pay royalties to the writers of the original game if they used the name only and hired someone else to write something new than to just pay them royalties for the whole script? Is Sony lacking confidence that Until Dawn won’t make back what it spent on making the film that they’re willing to cut around as many financial corners as possible to make this adaptation? Why even bother to begin with?

This screen adaptation of Until Dawn has a different premise, different characters, different everything. There are only a few aspects that exist from the original game that remain in this film; one being the character Dr Alan Hill (Peter Stormare), but only by name. He’s played by the same actor Supermassive Games hired for the video game but has an entirely different characterisation, one that reeks of cliché, Saturday morning villain-of-the-week-type hogwash.

One of the other nods to the original game is referencing its in-game characters through paper and ink. Their names are placed on some scattered documents shown towards the end of the film; one document alludes to being one of the entities that is constantly trying to kill the cast as they attempt to survive until dawn (ugh, I can’t believe I just wrote that).

And lastly, the final reference to the original Until Dawn involves a specific entity that stems from indigenous folklore; however, Dauberman took creative liberties by completely gutting the entity’s folkloric foundation and rewriting it to fit into the cons of one not being able to escape the horrors of Glore Valley—a seemingly cursed land in which the film is set. Nothing says progress like stripping culture from an idea and selling its hollowed-out body for profit.

So, if the original games’ narrative and cultural inclusions are outright removed, then what does Dauberman do with Until Dawn? Well, they turn it into a Groundhog Day-inspired slasher narrative where Clover (Ella Rubin), who’s in search of her sister Melanie (Maia Mitchell), ventures into the state woodlands with her friends Max (Michael Cimino), Nina (Odessa A’zion), Nina’s current boyfriend Abel (Belmont Cameli), and Megan (Ji-young Yoo) and are caught in some sort of temporal curse where they are forced to endure the horrors that spawn each night and try to survive until daybreak to escape the curse, like some sort of a cinematic tower defence game. That’s ironic.

This premise seems intriguing on paper, but its execution is by-the-numbers and sterile, and it’s a far cry from the game and might as well have been its own film entirely. What occurs in Until Dawn equates to a culmination of deaths that would fit the criteria of deaths used in slasher films, thought up by a group of people at a brainstorming meeting who were hired by bigwig corporate executives, then sewn together to make up the absurdity these characters endure; two ideas being completely ripped from the original game but disembowelled of their ties to the original game.

It’s vapid and insipid, and due to its Groundhog Day-inspired foundation, highly repetitive, which makes enduring its unoriginal and flavourless creations identical to the profundity of suffering the cast endures throughout the film. I swear, I couldn’t take seeing the same spooky elderly woman, the same masked killer, the same masked cloaked figure that’s 12-feet tall that creepily crawls through liminal spaces because that’s what the kids are into nowadays, or the same macabre clown any longer. It was cinematic torture, more so than what Alex goes through in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Continuing with Dauberman’s ideas for Until Dawn, the cast discovers a sign-in booklet for Glore Valley and notices that the people who were caught in its temporal curse would also sign their names and repeatedly did so each night, alluding to the idea that once a member of the party signs their name into the book, they’re locked in.

With each night, the handwriting of those who have been there prior becomes more and more illegible until it resembles something akin to chicken scratch by the 13th day—a clear visual cue that informs the viewer that those who are caught in the curse psychologically break down over time and that no one has made it past loop 13; and all done without the need for exposition—well, that is until they explain what they showed previously through exposition later in the film, just in case one needs reminding or couldn’t figure it out on their own.

The characters repeat the same night on a loop, defending themselves against the horrors through physical means and teamwork; however, these entities sell blows like they’re the hot new WWE wrestler with Omega plot armour. Dauberman writes these entities essentially as concrete walls reinforced by adamantium—the fictionalised, virtually indestructible metal alloy used within Marvel comics—so that no matter what the cast does to defend themselves, no matter what plan they concoct to outsmart these entities, they’re forced into a corner and just die.

To complement the idea of loss of sanity, it is told to Clover by one of the entities that if they can’t survive the night, then they will become part of it. These are some cool concepts, but it’s pretty much a guarantee that the cast will break down and become part of the night based on Dauberman’s design of Glore Valley’s entities, making their fate cheaply earned and unfulfilling to watch, yet there seems to be an issue regarding how this all plays out.

The characters begins to undergo changes in their physicality, but not by much, even when they’re nearing the median day, nor do they show signs of loss of sanity throughout the film. They seem to be fine, as they’re seemingly written to have psychological plot armour. Yet another promising concept turns to rot because of Dauberman’s inability to follow the continuity of his own ingenuity.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, Dauberman utilises a time-skip mechanic that cuts what could have been meat to facilitate his own idea. Yep, you read that correctly, but the irony here is that he doesn’t even bother utilising the stale practice of the dreaded montage, despite everything else that comprises this film being identically tasteless. Instead, the cast record each other’s deaths on their phones, because somehow their mobile phone batteries can hold a charge for thirteen consecutive nights.

Frankly, the only thing that Until Dawn has going for it is the prowess of its actors and its cinematography. The acting in this film isn’t anything remarkable, but it isn’t bad either. It’s leagues above the schlock one would find in a B-horror flick. Sandberg directed each one of the actors well, with Stormare being the exception; Sandberg somehow dropped the ball with him.

Instead of being inventive with Dr Hill, properly utilising Stormare’s skills as an actor, he reduces his unique approach to the likes of a shōnen anime villain, one who speaks primarily in monologues to those they wish to do harm to—an age-old trope from anime, manga, and comics alike. While watching his performance, it gives the impression that Sandberg essentially told Stormare, “Hey, man. You know how you’ve played some unhinged, off-kilter, unsettling roles in the past? Yeah, just do that stuff. Be wacky and weird, man! You got this!” as though his prowess as an actor is sheer novelty to fill the shoes of hackneyed characterisation, similarly to how some filmmakers utilise Nicholas Cage in the films he’s cast in.

The cinematography of Until Dawn is what impressed me the most, and not because it does anything unique or shows off the skills of cinematographer Maxime Alexandre. What caught my attention with Until Dawn’s cinematography is that Alexandre doesn’t overtly use triangular compositions in the most mundane of ways, nor does he overuse this choice of compositional framing at all. His approach with this film is one with a solid compositional foundation. I’m so used to seeing horror films, like It Follows (2014) and Longlegs (2024), solely rely on this contrived approach towards visual balance that not seeing it used in this film was quite the surprise!

Maybe contemporary horror films are shying away from this cinematographic approach? Could it be that those who watch film clips on TikTok have realised they can turn their phones sideways and watch a film in its proper widescreen aspect ratio? I’d call that progress, although I side with David Lynch and promote the idea that films shouldn’t be watched on a phone. “Seriously, get real.”

Unsurprisingly, Until Dawn is yet another poorly executed screen adaptation of a popular video game IP. As someone with an affinity towards video games and film, it distresses me that there are no good screen adaptations of video games. I know what you’re thinking, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie is good!” Stop it, no it’s not! Neither is Super Mario Bros. (1993). Hideo Kojima is producing a screen adaptation of his own game, Death Stranding—a game I rather enjoy—but A24 decided to hire Michael Sarnoski (Pig) to direct and write the film, so all hope is lost with that one.

The closest thing to a good screen adaptation of a video game is Paul W.S. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat (1995), if you could even call it that. Such is the plight of being a fan of video games, I suppose. I digress. Dauberman and Sandberg continue to prove to me that they’re incapable of creating compelling works within the horror genre or the medium of film as a whole. What perplexes me is that if these two, whether they’re working on a project together or not, keep creating work that badly flops, then how do they keep getting work?

USA • HUNGARY | 2025 | 103 MINUTES | 2.20:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: David F. Sandberg.
writers: Gary Doberman & Blair Butler (based on the video game ‘Until Dawn’ by PlayStation Studios).
starring: Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion, Ji-young You, Belmont Cameli. Maia Mitchell & Peter Stormare.