Aweek after the release of Ryan Coogler’s unusual, artfully crafted horrorSinners, we are now back to the industry’s genre norm with Until Dawn, a schlocky video game adaptation that has far less on its mind. Such a drastic drop in IQ and ambition means there’s no serious comparison to be made here and this weekend there’ll be no real competition at the box office (Sinners is likely to remain on top) so such contrast does ultimately allow the film to stay within its own, sillier space, a deep-fried donut for dessert after a filet mignon entree.
On its own, lower-stakes terms, Until Dawn is a passable, if rather unfrightening frightener, made with some skill and enlivened by a strong troupe of young actors, enough to notch it slightly above the piss-poor standard but not quite enough to really justify its existence. The game it’s based on has been described by the director David F Sandberg as “pretty much a 10-hour movie” but with interactive elements, the idea being that you can affect the direction of a narrative that would otherwise be fixed. There’s obviously no such gimmick here (at times one wonders what a Bandersnatch-style choose-your-own-adventure version would look like) and so instead, there’s a replication of the gaming process. In Until Dawn the movie, when the characters die they’re then brought back to life to die all over again.
Those characters are also different here than in the game, a group of twentysomethings who are retracing the final journey made by Melanie, their missing friend. Her sister Clover (Anora’s unimpressed housemate Ella Rubin) is fueled by guilt, their last conversation an argument, and while those around her are starting to lose faith, she’s compelled to follow vague clues all the way to a mysterious valley and the welcome centre that greets them. Taking shelter from the rain, the group is soon picked off by a masked killer only to wake up and find themselves back at the beginning. They’re stuck in a time loop where each decision leads them into a differently horrifying death.
Except those deaths, while certainly violent, aren’t quite as inventive as they could have been, most involving something sharp piercing through something soft (some spontaneous combustion midway does at least break the monotony nicely). A character jokes that the time loop is reminiscent of that one movie, but as another points out, it’s happened in an awful lot of them at this stage and even within the horror genre – in films such as Triangle, Happy Death Day, The Final Girls and Lucky – it’s become increasingly common (also using dialogue to admit unoriginality is not the save some screenwriters seem to think it is!). There’s an obvious comparison to 2011’s The Cabin in the Woods and even with both the structural novelty and the 14-year gap, this still feels like the kind of cliched split-up-and-investigate-noises nonsense that Joss Whedon was poking fun at in the first place.
Transplanting a video game such as this to screen has its pitfalls – one almost wants to reach out and click on the many obvious pick-up-and-explore clues littered around the house – but it does also give a plucky, Scooby Doo charm to some of the group text-on-screen investigation. The cast, also including Hellraiser’s Odessa A’zion and Love Victor’s Michael Cimino, are likable and committed, if stuck with predictably underwritten characters, and the gruelling nature of the die, wake up and repeat plot compels us to root for their survival. Their journey to finding out the details of their predicament and then some sort of way out is a little haphazard, the only real bright spot being a chance for Peter Stormare to reprise a version of his role in the game. His ramblings about trauma and wendigos might be nonsensical, but he delivers it all with snarling gusto.
Until Dawn is well-staged and entirely inoffensive, which, in a year that’s seen horror dreck likeThe Monkey,Opus,The Gorge,Heart EyesandWolf Man, will just about do. It’s held together by Sandberg, a director who has mastered the art of totally competent studio horror with slick, equally forgettable films like Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation and he again shows himself to be a crisply efficient commercial film-maker again let down by a far less effective script. For a film all about repetition, one viewing will suffice.
Until Dawn is out in US and UK cinemas on 25 April