Until Dawn movie review: Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino starrer is a fairly crisp gamey horror entertainer

Still from the movie

Cast: Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A'zion, Ji-young Yoo, Belmont Cameli, Maia Mitchell, Peter Stormare, Willem van der Vegt
Director: David F. Sandberg
Rating: 2.5/5
Runtime: 103 min.

This video game adaptation is better than most. ‘Until Dawn's' translation from PlayStation console to silver screen is fairly good entertainment. Director/ producer David F. Sandberg, along with producer/ writer Gary Dauberman and writer Blair Butler, creates an adventurous horror journey that chronicles a group of friends having a harrowing trip. It's a gamey genre film but not too obvious. Delightful ingenuity and inventive slaying are the hallmarks here.

Sandberg returns to low-budget genre filmmaking after the big-budget debacle that the ‘Shazam' sequel was. "Until Dawn," which is an adaptation of a 2015 video game known for its unique interactivity, fails to mimic that special quality and instead goes for chills. The mix of a haunted house movie and slasher cinema is not exactly inviting as screenwriters Blair Butler and Gary Dauberman stay well within storyline constraints and fashion a thriller with a splattering of excitement but not many thrills.

It's one year after her sister, Melanie (Maia Mitchell), went missing, and Clover (Ella Rubin) is looking for closure. She reviews the last video sent to her and decides go with her friend Max (Michael Cimino), psychic pal Megan (Ji-young Yoo), and couple Nina (Odessa A'zion) and Abel (Belmont Cameli), to a gas station owned by Hill (Peter Stormare), which was the last place Melanie posted from. That one clue leads them to the town of Glore Valley. Clover and friends find their way to the visitor's center during a torrential rainstorm. The gang begins to poke around in the empty building, noticing a wall of missing person fliers, with Melanie included. They also find an hourglass that's emptying faster than it should. The gang is then attacked by a masked killer, who succeeds at butchering the visitors. But it's a vicious cycle of reincarnation where they return to life and are forced to "survive the night, or become part of it".

It's a bit weird that the group do not see the ring of dry weather within a torrential rain storm as something unreal, moving ahead with a nonchalance which feels altogether fake. The visitor's center remains the prime location for all that hocus-pocus taking place. The masked killer madman on the loose, is part of the fantastical "reset" for the characters who are destroyed and return slightly worn and torn.

The time-loop premise is not taken advantage of fully while the exposition also feels a bit fractured. The characters move around in the dark, periodically discovering horrible clues, including the Glore Valley Witch who appears to be the key to all that's going on. The exploratory sequences fail to compel and the video game-like thrust of the narrative makes all that walking around and searching for clues, quite dull at times.

The setting is straight out of a typical genre film. But the start is friendlier and brighter and its only when the killing starts that it gets murkier. The group of kids, the gas station, warning from the proprietor point to a template that has long since worn out its welcome. But there's quite a bit of gamey entertainment value to be had. The film is not without its fun, ingenious horror moments.