Sandberg's Until Dawn Delivers Chills But Leaves Depth in the Dark

I’ve been pretty excited for Until Dawn, but not for the reasons you might think. As I said in my review of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, I’m not much of a gamer anymore, so I’ve never played any of the Until Dawn video games. I am, however, very familiar with the man who directed this film, and I love his work. He made the surprise 2016 horror gem Lights Out, he revitalized the Annabelle franchise with Annabelle: Creation, and he even dipped his toes into the superhero world with the two Shazam! movies. He’s one of the best genre filmmakers working today, so I couldn’t wait to see his latest project even though I had zero experience with the source material.

Until Dawn was directed by David F. Sandberg, and it stars Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A'zion, Ji-young Yoo, Belmont Cameli, and Peter Stormare. In the film, a woman named Melanie went missing a year ago, and now, Melanie’s sister Clover and four of her friends–Nina, Max, Megan, and Abe–retrace her final steps looking for answers.

The group ultimately find what they were looking for, but the truth comes at a steep price. They end up in a Groundhog Day-esque time loop where they come under attack by a different bloodthirsty monster every time, and if they can just survive until dawn (hence the name!), their nightmare will finally be over.

As you can probably guess from that plot synopsis, Until Dawn doesn’t fit neatly into any one horror subgenre. Rather, each new iteration of this night brings a whole new brand of terror, so David F. Sandberg gets to try his hand at a few different types of scares. He gives us a lot of the typical cliches we associate with these various subgenres, but to the surprise of no one, he executes them so well you won’t mind the lack of originality.

As usual, he excels at crafting creepy visuals, effective jump scares, and edge-of-your-seat suspense, so if you’re a big horror fan like me, you’ll get a real kick out of this whirlwind tour of the genre. The unpredictability of each new night also keeps us on our toes as we eagerly await the next deadly threat, so I can’t reveal the specific dangers our main characters have to face.

It would spoil some of the fun, but I can tell you that they’re not always the typical horror villains you’re probably expecting. Sure, we get a few tried-and-true genre staples, but there are also a couple of surprises you won’t see coming. It’s a pretty nice cornucopia of terror for most of the film’s runtime, but at a certain point, it feels like the script just runs out of steam.

See, while each new version of the night brings its own unique horrors, there’s also a lot of carryover. Monsters can pop up again numerous times, and by the end, Until Dawn starts to get repetitive. We begin seeing the same monsters around every corner, and that’s a real bummer because the creativity of the scares is the only thing this movie has going for it.

The characters are decent at best, and the plot is little more than an excuse to showcase all these different horror subgenres. To be fair, there was quite a bit of potential here for genuine depth. Anybody who’s ever spent a lot of time with the same group of people knows that even the best of friends can eventually start to annoy one another, so it would be fascinating to see that dynamic play out in a horrific scenario like this one.

There are so many rich possibilities inherent in this story, but unfortunately, Until Dawn almost completely ignores them. Instead, the film is content to feed us feel-good platitudes about refusing to escape the ordeal unless the entire group makes it out alive, and while I appreciate the pro-human-life sentiment, that kind of surface-level moralizing is no substitute for engaging storytelling.

It’s a huge thematic disappointment, and at the end of the day, that’s the big problem with Until Dawn. There’s simply not much going on here beyond the fun horror, so once that began to get stale, the movie started to lose me. Don’t get me wrong, I never checked out entirely, so I don’t think this is a bad movie. It’s just not particularly good either. It’s fun to watch once, but when the credits begin to roll and you walk out of the theater, you’ll be ready to move on with your life and never think about this film again.