Studio:   Screen Gems
Director: David F. Sandberg
Writer:   Gary Dauberman, Blair Butler
Producer: Asad Qizilbash, Carter Swan, David F. Sandberg, Lotta Losten, Roy Lee, Gary Dauberman, Mia Maniscalco
Stars:    Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A’Zion, Ji-Young Yoo, Belmont Cameli, Maia Mitchell, Peter Stormare

Review Score:

Summary:

In search of a missing young woman, five friends become trapped in a mysterious place where they are repeatedly murdered and resurrected.

Synopsis:

Using an apologetic video message to track the young woman’s last known location, Clover Paul travels to remote Glore Valley, Pennsylvania, to search for her missing sister Melanie, who vanished shortly after their mother’s tragic death. Clover is joined by her ex-boyfriend Max, their psychic-sensitive friend Megan, their other friend Nina, and Nina’s new boyfriend Abe.

Clover discusses a wave of missing persons in the area with a bearded man behind the register at a roadside store. From the man’s information, Clover directs her friends through a mysterious rainstorm that leads them to a lone house converted into a welcome center in an otherwise empty clearing. Among other oddities in the house, the friends notice a desk calendar for 1998, an hourglass on the wall, and homemade graves outside.

Abe finds a bulletin board full of missing persons flyers, including one for Clover’s sister Melanie. Nina also notices Melanie’s name repeatedly written with an increasingly sloppy signature in a guest registry.

Strange events occur as the hourglass sands begin falling. A blade-wielding psycho in a clown mask suddenly cuts Abe in half, then kills Nina before chasing and murdering Max, Megan, and finally Clover.

The hourglass on the wall spins 180 degrees to reset. Clover, Max, Megan, Nina, and Abe inexplicably return to life shortly after their arrival, but with memories of their recent deaths.

Everyone’s pictures now appear on the missing persons bulletin board. Entering an entranced state, Megan points at individual flyers while speaking in the voices of various victims. Megan immediately falls dead when her neck suddenly snaps.

An unseen force violently pulls Clover into a dilapidated house that materializes outside. Inside the other house, Clover finds an old witch watching a TV news report about a mine collapse. The witch warns Clover that “the only way out is to survive the night or become part of it.” Placing her respirator on Clover’s face, the witch crumbles into dust as Clover becomes possessed.

Abe and Nina try driving away in Abe’s car, but they’re stopped by a massive monster. The psycho then kills them.

Max searches creepy rooms in the witch’s house for Clover. Wearing a mask similar to the psycho’s, Clover kills Max in her possessed state. Afterward, Clover strides outside where she is struck down by the psycho driving Abe’s vehicle.

When time resets a second time, the five friends notice they are gradually transforming. Clover tells the others about the witch’s warning, leading everyone to conclude they can end their supernatural ordeal if they can make it until dawn without dying, otherwise they may continue mutating.

After drinking discolored tap water, Abe repeatedly coughs until he spontaneously combusts. Nina, Megan, and Max subsequently explode too.

The bearded man from the roadside store enters to confront Clover. The man tells Clover she “almost made it” right before she suddenly combusts.

Time resets again. In searching the house for clues, Clover finds medical credentials identifying the bearded man as Dr. Alan J. Hill, the chief psychiatrist at Glore Valley Sanitorium. A newspaper reveals that when a local mining disaster resulted in over 1,100 deaths 20 years ago, Dr. Hill was brought in to work with traumatized survivors. The rest of the town fell into the earth, which is why the welcome center is the only structure still above ground. A videotape shows one of Dr. Hill’s patients transforming into a wendigo, a creature representing extreme hunger.

Over a radio, Dr. Hill tells the friends that four of them can leave, but one of them must die. He also claims he is with Clover’s sister Melanie.

From a map, Clover pinpoints Dr. Hill’s location as the sanitorium, which is now underground, but can be reached via subterranean tunnels. Clover sets off alone into the woods to look for Dr. Hill and Melanie.

Upset at his boorish behavior, and knowing they will resurrect anyway, Nina swings a pickax into Abe. The couple has a personal conversation while Abe lies dying on the floor. When the psycho enters, Nina tells him to kill Abe first, which he does. The psycho then kills Nina.

Max and Megan go after Clover. In the woods, a wendigo attacks Megan and drags her away.

Max finds Clover caught in an animal trap. Max pulls Clover free just as they are attacked by Megan, who has now fully transformed into a wendigo.

Believing they can ultimately survive after dying again, Clover convinces Max to cut her throat. He then moves to confront Megan, but his body suddenly explodes.

After time resets again, Clover, Max, Nina, and Abe find themselves back in the house, but without Megan. From the guest registry of repeated signatures, the four friends conclude no one has ever survived past 13 nights, and they are now on their final night.

Vowing to save her sister and kill Dr. Hill, Clover ventures into an underground tunnel leading toward the sanitorium. Max, Nina, and Abe fight off wendigos and the psycho so Clover can continue ahead.

Clover finally finds Melanie, but discovers she has been transformed into a wendigo. Following a fight, Clover reluctantly tackles her sister into a jutting blade that kills her. Meanwhile, the other three friends kill the psycho by smashing his head with a sledgehammer.

Clover finds Megan locked inside a padded cell in the sanitorium with a wendigo poised to attack. Looking for a way to free her friend, Clover enters an office where she confronts Dr. Hill.

Dr. Hill calls Clover “an intriguing patient.” He then identifies the psycho as another patient, Joshua Washington. Dr. Hill further explains that he has been studying fear, and Glore Valley’s tragedy made it a unique paranormal hotspot for manifesting terrors in different forms like the wendigo, witch, and psycho. To make the place truly effective, however, someone always has to die permanently.

Clover reveals she drugged Dr. Hill’s coffee with poisoned water without him noticing. Dr. Hill suddenly explodes.

Using Dr. Hill’s keys, Clover frees Megan. The two of them escape a wendigo attack and crawl up through the homemade graves to return to the surface where they rejoin Max, Nina, and Abe just as the sands run out in the hourglass.

The monsters retreat as dawn breaks. The storm overhead clears. Having survived the night, all five friends drive off in Abe’s vehicle.

Review:

Evidently, “Until Dawn’s” scriptwriters misunderstood the assignment. Instead of directly adapting the same-named PlayStation title, they just heard “video game” and concocted a senseless scenario where characters repeatedly lose their lives, respawn, then make continued attempts to survive various levels, or rather scenes, that gradually increase in difficulty. All of this seems based on a reductive notion of how video games function, never mind if the idea fits a film’s fiction.

From narrative direction to dialogue, “Until Dawn” employs cheap writing every chance it gets. Few things make a moviegoing experience more disappointing than seeing open opportunities to explore imaginative creative choices, yet watching the film take easy ways out at each available turn.

The setup starts with a young woman, Clover, searching for her missing sister Melanie in a remote Pennsylvania valley. For reasons that only work for building a diverse body count, Clover brings along her ex-boyfriend Max, their friend Megan, their other friend Nina, and Nina’s new boyfriend Abe.

It's bad that the five friends introduce each other’s basic backstories with declarative exposition like “Don’t forget why she dumped you in the first place” and “Their mom had just died like weeks before and she shouldn’t have left Clover when she did.” It’s worse that their cursory relationships have no meaningful bearing on anyone’s identity or interactions. Abe could be Megan’s boyfriend instead of Nina’s, or Max and Abe could be brothers, since none of these dotted lines ever matter much at all. Except for Clover, who has an actual motivation, they’re mostly interchangeable pincushions with only the slightest swaths of distinguishable personalities.

After getting directions from a clearly suspicious Peter Stormare at a roadside store, the quintet drives through a mysterious rainstorm that magically traps them in a dark clearing with one lone house. Between the homemade graves in the yard and the wall-mounted hourglass adorned with an ominous skull, it’s easy to see why everyone is immediately unsettled. Which is why it’s hilarious when Abe, after finding an alarming collection of missing persons posters and having his car commandeered by a shadowy figure, hears a startling noise and unironically says, “I’ll check it out and be right back” as if everything is totally normal.

For his clumsily plotted stupidity, Abe gets cut in half by a clown-masked psycho, who goes on to savagely slaughter the others too. However, the hourglass flips over and everyone inexplicably returns to life. They remember being murdered, but they’re back at the beginning of the evening, and they appear to be gradually transforming. In record time, the five friends quickly conclude they’re stuck in a supernatural loop that forces them to face various monsters and menaces, and each eerie encounter always ends in death.

The movie eventually offers a limp, hand-waving explanation for why this strange place manifests a mishmash of hairless wendigos that behave like aggressive zombies, spontaneous combustion, and a cryptic witch watching television, but it’s all a kitchen sink of cliched clutter. In one sequence, Max explores a weird room whose lighting fixtures are decorated with doll heads because, it’s a creepy visual, I guess? In another corner of the same room, a clown doll sways back and forth in a creaky rocking chair, which also has no context yet is supposed to seem scary on looks alone.

It turns out the group has to survive 13 nights, presumably because 13 is considered a spooky number, except we don’t even get to see all 13. After what’s only been four resets for us, the friends realize they’re on their final night, but they’re having trouble remembering what happened. Abe, the king of unintentionally comedic lines, asks out loud, “Didn’t I record something?” Suddenly, and serendipitously, there’s a collection of videos from the other nights on a phone he was only ever shown using once.

“Until Dawn’s” writers had a preexisting blueprint to work from in the form of the game they were supposedly adapting. They didn’t even have to come up with everything out of their own imaginations, yet they still chose to populate their “Groundhog Day but horror” plot with the most familiar frights and predictable actions possible.

Need a flashback to fill in a blank, but have nowhere logical to put it? How about stuffing the scene into a non-sequitur nightmare sequence? We’ve reached the two-thirds mark and the protagonists still need new bits of missing information? Easy, have them find an old newspaper, a videotape, and a conveniently placed pile of records to get them up to speed. “Until Dawn” contains a staggering amount of deus ex machinas, outnumbered only by how many times the same deaths are recycled over and over when the movie’s own concept gives it carte blanche to do much cleverer things instead.

Someone likened “Until Dawn” to a mix between “Cabin in the Woods” and “Silent Hill,” which is spot-on, as long as it’s clear we’re talking about heavily watered-down imitations of those films. Snappy pacing, crisp camerawork, and ample atmosphere almost successfully distract the audience from noticing how pat the progression is. It’s a credit to the craftsmanship that the film feels finished. Unfortunately, the lazy script it was shot from does not.

Review Score: 45