Until Dawn review – an insult­ing parade of tedium

The video game film adap­ta­tion has been under­go­ing a trans­for­ma­tion in form in recent years. It used to be that a video game movie would sim­ply take some of its source material’s atmos­phere and iconog­ra­phy and toss out the rest, but late­ly games have been receiv­ing more faith­ful pix­el-to-screen con­ver­sions. Still, old ways die hard, and Until Dawn is a com­mit­ted throw­back. The orig­i­nal game is a choose-your-own-adven­ture slash­er movie, where the choic­es made by the play­er (whether that’s an explic­it deci­sion of which path to take or success/​failure to hit a timed but­ton prompt) slight­ly alter the direc­tion of the sto­ry. It’s unlike­ly that two play­ers will end their play through with the same arrange­ment of char­ac­ters hav­ing sur­vived. The game is fun because, despite its rec­og­niz­able hor­ror ele­ments, the ele­ment of inter­ac­tion intro­duces a feel­ing of two-way con­ver­sa­tion. It’s a game for peo­ple who shout ​“don’t go in there!” at the screen dur­ing hor­ror movies – now you can decide whether they should go in there or not.

The film adap­ta­tion eschews the game’s sto­ry and most of its cast, except for Peter Stor­mare as the req­ui­site creepy gas sta­tion atten­dant, for orig­i­nal mate­r­i­al. Clover (Ella Rubin) and her CW-style friend group are search­ing for her miss­ing sis­ter a year after she van­ished. Flee­ing a thun­der­storm, they stum­ble into a wel­come cen­ter for a mys­te­ri­ous town, and when the sun sets they are all set upon and butchered by a masked mani­ac. When they all wake up again at the begin­ning of the evening, they real­ize that they’re trapped in a time loop, and the only way out is to survive….until dawn. Direc­tor David F. Sand­berg, whose first fea­ture was the glo­ri­ous­ly cru­el hor­ror film Lights Out, relat­ed the time loop struc­ture to the abil­i­ty to replay the game to see dif­fer­ent paths and out­comes. But the game Until Dawn noto­ri­ous­ly dis­al­lows the abil­i­ty to reload saves and take back mis­takes. It’s a strange mis­ap­pre­hen­sion of the source material’s strengths, and it’s not the only one.

Where the game got away with using famil­iar hor­ror iconog­ra­phy by way of audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion, los­ing the nov­el­ty of inter­ac­tion leaves the film feel­ing tedious­ly con­ven­tion­al. The scares couldn’t be creaki­er: a rock­ing chair sway­ing on its own, a ghost-pos­sessed girl’s ban­shee shriek, a litany of creepy masks. Even the game’s wendi­gos (brought to life by its co-writer, indie hor­ror leg­end Lar­ry Fes­senden) are ren­dered here as mere­ly gener­ic zom­bies. The film promis­es that every night will con­tain a new hor­ror, but the lack of vari­ety means they all feel as pun­ish­ing­ly repet­i­tive for the view­er as they are for the characters.

The game’s sto­ry may not have been the most unique thing in the world, but the film replaces it with a tired rip-off of The Cab­in in the Woods. A pre-cred­its stinger (and a pho­to-only cameo from Rami Malek) promis­es a sequel that more faith­ful­ly adapts the game, but it’s too lit­tle too late. As A Minecraft Movie and The Last of Us have proven, you no longer need to aban­don a game’s essence in screen adap­ta­tion. The Playsta­tion Pro­duc­tions logo promis­es future adap­ta­tions of games like ​‘Hori­zon’ and ​‘Ghost of Tsushi­ma’. Hope­ful­ly by the time they come around, the stu­dio will have real­ized that if you build it, they will come.

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