Review: Until Dawn

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]

On paper, a cinematic adaptation of Sony’s Until Dawn franchise is the most ill-conceived idea ever proposed. The identically titled video game is, after all, essentially just a controllable movie already, with the player’s decisions and successes/failures altering the trajectory of the branching narrative; attempting to translate such a fundamentally interactive experience to a medium that by its very nature cannot replicate the source material’s defining feature feels… misguided, to phrase it charitably. To his credit, however, director David F. Sandberg manages to find a legitimately creative solution to this seemingly insurmountable problem. The stock time loop plot is an inspired (albeit somewhat clichéd) substitute for the “butterfly effect” mechanic, retaining the original version’s central theme of choice and consequence despite the obvious lack of audience agency/participation.

Unfortunately, there’s not much else to recommend here. After the delightfully subversive first act—a brutally realistic twist on the Friday the 13th formula, in which our protagonists are gruesomely slaughtered in rapid succession with hilariously minimal effort on the part of the psychotic serial killer du jour—the initial novelty of the premise quickly loses its luster. The characters are thinly sketched and underdeveloped, depriving their convoluted web of interpersonal conflicts of any semblance of emotional stakes or urgency. The dialogue is clunky and inorganic, bloated by unwieldy exposition and utterly devoid of subtlety. The pacing is likewise uneven; apparently, the filmmakers were too impatient to commit to the story’s cyclical structure, because nearly a third of the repetitions occur entirely off-screen, reduced to ellipses and briefly glimpsed vignettes. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum…

Ultimately, Until Dawn delivered exactly what I was looking for following an exhausting (but rewarding!) first week on a new job: intellectually unchallenging, competently crafted, disposable popcorn entertainment. Unremarkable and inoffensive in equal measure, it’s neither accomplished nor atrocious enough to leave a lasting impression; it will soon fade from pop culture’s collective memory like a foul odor carried off by a lazy breeze.