- Director: David F. Sandberg
- Screenplay: Gary Dauberman, Blair Butler
- Cast: Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion, Ji-young Yoo, Belmont Cameli, Peter Stormare
- Cinematography: Maxime Alexandre
- Editing: Michel Aller
- Score: Benjamin Wallfisch
- Genre: Survival horror
- Runtime: 103 minutes
While based on a PlayStation 4 game of the same name, ‘Until Dawn’ veers significantly from its source material. In the video game, the player, from what I gather, has to make decisions that can alter their outcome. They either die or survive due to the choices they’ve made, learning that actions, no matter how big or small, sometimes have fatal consequences.
The cinematic adaptation strips this interactive element away and forces you to become a bystander to your average ‘teens in a cabin in the woods’ kind of horror flick. The group of youngsters must work against the clock to escape their grim surroundings and stay alive…until dawn.
If you went in ‘blind’, you’d be thrown by the five protagonists’ deaths in the first portion. Then it’ll dawn on you that they’re caught in a time loop which keeps undoing their demises. As one of the characters actually says: “it’s just like in that movie”, showing a level of self-awareness of how unoriginal the concept is. If they last until all the sand has gushed through an overturned hourglass, they succeed. If they fail after a dozen or so attempts, they’re trapped forever in eternal gloom.
With the numerous fatalities, expect plenty of gore amid the typical masked killer slashings and half-baked plot (which probably made more sense in the video game than it does here). A false dawn indeed.
Can you survive till sunrise? Or at least 103 minutes of such banality?
My rating: 4 / 10
SilverScreen 