When Until Dawn landed on Netflix last week, I felt a sense of morbid curiosity. When director David F. Sandberg’s adaptation of the 2015 survival horror game released in theaters earlier this year, I was utterly disappointed and found myself agreeing with Polygon’s review: This film is trying to do too much. I was also severely bummed that anything resembling the original game was mostly reduced to blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos or a complete reinvention of characters (Dr. Hill, I’m looking at you) that feels so left-field it truly just takes you out of the entire film.
And yet, as a huge fan of both the video game and its creators Supermassive Games, I couldn’t resist giving Until Dawn another shot. I was curious to see how I’d feel if I watched it again — this is a time-loop movie, after all — so I booted up Netflix and went to town. And you know what? Until Dawn absolutely slaps.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for both the Until Dawn game and film.]
For my second viewing, I tried something new: I pretended I wasn’t watching an Until Dawn adaptation at all. Instead, this was just a regular ol’ horror movie about a group of young adults in a weird, haunted house. I know that sounds disingenuous. Pretend it’s not exactly what it stated itself to be? How can you do that?
As it turns out, I couldn’t. At least, not all the way through. The movie begins with young adult Melanie (Maia Mitchell) escaping from an underground bunker. She flees into the woods, but gets caught and killed by a man in a mask eerily similar to the masked killer in the original game.
We then join our main characters of the movie: a group of teenagers who go on a road trip to help Clover (Ella Rubin) grieve her sister, the aforementioned Melanie, who disappeared a year earlier. She’s joined by her friends Megan (Ji-young Yoo,) Max (Michael Cimino,) Nina (Odessa A’zion,) and Nina’s boyfriend Abe (Belmont Cameli.) Unfortunately for her friends, Clover’s been investigating her sister’s last location on the sly. She intentionally leads the group to Glore Valley, where they discover a mysterious lodge. While the teens explore, Nina finds Melanie’s name, along with several others, in the hotel’s records. This correlates with the missing person posters Abe finds in another room. Then, just as the mystery starts to unravel, a masked psychopath breaks in and slaughters every single one of them…
“Short movie,” you might think, but uh oh, it’s revealed the group’s names are now also written in the book, trapping them in a time loop until they can survive through the night until dawn. In my first watch, I found this idea ridiculous. The whole point of the video game Until Dawn is that there are no second chances. You make your decisions and you live with them. If a character dies, that’s it, they’re not coming back (until you inevitably replay the entire game to save everyone, of course.)
On my second watch, however, I appreciate how the film leans more into the game’s experience than I initially realized. The time loop, combined with the movie’s various horrifying creatures and horrible ways to die (which combine to offer an experience best described as Groundhog Day meets Cabin in the Woods,) subtly lean into another key aspect of the video game: the butterfly effect.
With Until Dawn’s butterfly effect system, players were forced to make choices that permanently altered the outcome of the game. For example, if you chose to dismiss Ashley during a pivotal moment, she might not open the door for you during a chase with the Wendigo, leaving you to die. You could also receive warnings by finding totems, which would give your character a premonition of future choices. The same can be said for the time loops in this film: They warn the characters what to avoid to survive a little bit longer on their next playthrough.
This isn’t a perfect adaptation by any means, and the film’s big twist still feels anticlimactic and somewhat unearned. But I was pleasantly surprised to find a new detail to delight about the second time around.
And it’s not just one detail, either. The incredible sequence in the mines where Clover hides behind a pile of wreckage while the Wendigo (a mythological creature from Algonquian folklore) screeches above her head is a perfect callback to Emily, who, alongside the rest of the game’s cast, also finds herself dealing with these pesky creatures in the video game.
Speaking of the cast, one of the most perfect things about the video game was how completely insufferable they all were. I found myself missing this when I first saw the movie. Has there ever been a scene as iconic as Emily’s “understand the palm of my hand, bitch?” in video game horror? No, and I won’t hear otherwise. The lack of messy, interpersonal drama in the film felt severely lacking by comparison. The movie attempts it with Max and Clover being exes, but it’s just not the same as watching Jessica and Emily’s catfight over Mike, or Matt accusing Emily of cheating on him while she’s literally holding onto the skeleton of a burning building across a massive drop. It’s campy in the best way. The cast of the Until Dawn film feels much more mature and almost too nice at times. For example, Abe takes it much better than I would if my girlfriend decided to stab me with a pickaxe just because I was being a bit annoying. (Alright, he suggested the group sacrifice someone, but potato, potahto.)
While some truly wild changes in this film make me question the direction of the director and writers — Dr. Hill being the evil mastermind behind the mines? Jail to whoever thought that idea up — I have to grudgingly admit that there’s more about this movie that is a love letter to the game than I first thought. Its ties to trauma as the real horror, and what trauma can turn you into, are actually pretty true to the game’s original message.
All in all, the Until Dawn movie may be clunky and often bogged down by far too many horror cliches to count, but as far as adaptations go, I had a good time with it. At the very least, it’s far from the worst video game film I’ve seen. That title still goes to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.