Our second video game movie in the month of April 2025 is releasing in theaters this weekend, this time an adaptation of the very popular horror Playstation game Until Dawn. And despite having never played the game, I was excited for this movie and hoped I would have a good time, and that’s because Until Dawn was directed by David F. Sandberg, who made very effective horror films like Annabelle: Creation and Lights Out before going onto more big budget studio fare with the two Shazam movies. Seeing Sandberg back in the horror space was reason enough for excitement, but how did this thing ultimately turn out?

Clover (Ella Rubin) has been distraught since her sister went missing a year ago. Since then, she has desperately searched for her sister with no luck. She arranges a group of friends (Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion, Ji-young Yoo and Belmont Cameli) to come with her to the remote location where she was last seen, looking for answers. Once there, they soon realize they have fallen into an increasingly terrifying trap where different horrifying entities are hunting them down, and there’s a time loop situation happening where they keep dying repeatedly and the only way out of this is to survive…until dawn.

So, I wasn’t expecting a clever dissection of the horror genre here, or expecting anything psychologically exciting, but my god is this a stupid movie. Characters in horror movies make stupid decisions and that’s by design, but these kids seem to not really be concerned about their own lives, and that’s frustrating from the outset. There’s a thing that happens with the weather when they first get to the town’s welcome center, where it’s pouring down rain everywhere surrounding this place except for it, and it would be very clear to any rational person that this is some kind of parallel universe and that you should get the hell out of there as quickly as possible, but what do they do? They open the creaky doors and go into the creepy basement and seem surprised when things go bump in the night. I understand that without this, there’s no movie, but I feel like there had to be some other way to get us into this world.

I also wasn’t terribly impressed with any particular actor here. Ella Rubin is our lead, and she’s fine, but we don’t really know enough about her to really give a damn for the majority of the narrative. And Michael Cimino, who gave a wonderful performance for three years on Hulu’s Love, Victor, has the same problem that everyone else here does. These characters are not written well enough to give the actors playing them anything to do, and the performances kind of feel like nothing as a result. We don’t know enough about these people to care about them, and any character work the actor might be bringing to the proceedings just feels like a bit of a waste. 

There’s a taste of the promise David F. Sandberg showed in his previous films in the horror genre here, but I think this approach to the source material is all off. For one, a premise that promises a new, terrifying entity to be hunting its characters every night, but not really giving you very much throughout that feels new and exciting, feels like a bummer. We have a couple fun or exciting moments of body horror and visceral grossness, but a lot of it feels underwhelming. You get the impression that Sandberg wanted to copy the good ideas of films like Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods, or Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, and can’t quite get there. And the main reason for that is because those movies had something that felt fresh and original, and Until Dawn never does. It’s also infuriatingly heavy on the cheap jumpscare, which feels almost insulting at this point as a viewer.

As someone unfamiliar with this source material, I can’t speak to how Sandberg’s film lives up to it or doesn’t, but purely as a genre exercise, Until Dawn doesn’t really do anything to set itself apart from so many films like it. The script is lousy, the performances are a big bag of nothing and it lacks a crucial level of excitement. It’s directed and paced well, but it never blew me away and kept me at a distance for the majority. The frustrating thing about Until Dawn is that so many of the inherent problems here seem like they should have been easily fixable, but I was never locked in, I never cared about the characters and I was never really blown away by the kills. Unfortunately, I found Until Dawn to be underwhelming and frustrating where it should be creative and exciting, but I could absolutely see this becoming the kind of horror film that becomes a franchise where they eventually get it right.