A year after her sister Melanie vanishes, Clover (Ella Rubin) gathers a group of friends and heads to Glore Valley — a snowy, isolated ghost town steeped in local legend. But what begins as a search for closure quickly spirals into a waking nightmare. The group is cursed to relive the same horrific night over and over again, each time dying in new, increasingly brutal ways. With every reset, the horror genre shifts — one night a slasher, another a supernatural ghost story, then body horror, then monster mayhem. The only constant is the rule: survive until dawn.
It’s a chilling premise with genuine potential. But as the night resets again and again, so too does the film — stuck in a loop of spectacle without consequence, atmosphere without weight, and horror without heart.
David F. Sandberg’s Until Dawn isn’t a remake of the critically acclaimed 2015 PlayStation game — though at times it pretends to be. It’s a spiritual prequel, a parallel thread in the same universe, designed to expand the franchise rather than retell it. But where the game immersed players in choice, consequence, and fear born from personal failure, the film opts for a time loop that mimics structure but never soul. It trades emotional weight for genre chaos and assumes that more blood equals more fear.
To its credit, the film wastes no time. The conflict begins almost immediately. There’s a quick flash of backstory and then we’re already spiraling through death after death. That may be intentional — a modern horror instinct to get to the point — but without mystery or buildup, horror becomes noise. The events unfold quickly, but the characters don’t, and neither does the dread. If the goal was to pull the audience straight into the meat of the story, the result ends up feeling rushed and hollow. The set-up might be fast, but it’s not captivating.
The time loop mechanic is the film’s central idea, and at first, it’s a clever way to echo the video game’s trial-and-error dynamic. Characters retain bruises and memories from previous loops, and each reset seems to escalate the danger and shift the genre. It’s a concept that works on paper, and for some horror fans, it might offer the unpredictable tension they crave.
But by the third or fourth reset, the novelty wears off. What could’ve been a smart, escalating narrative devolves into a collage of loosely connected horror tropes. The film tries everything: masked killers, witches, creatures, possession, psychological horror. It’s Groundhog Day meets Cabin in the Woods, with a dash of teenage melodrama. But the result is a tonal mess — not an evolution of fear, but a parade of it. A highlight reel. A haunted house walkthrough, not a story.
What made the video game extraordinary was never just its monsters. It was the emotional gamble. Every choice mattered. One wrong decision, and you might doom a character you’d grown to care about. The tension wasn’t in watching horror unfold — it was in knowing you could’ve prevented it.
The movie replaces that feeling with passive déjà vu. We watch characters die, then reset. We know it’ll happen again. We know nothing sticks. Even the characters seem aware of it, but they’re not shaped by it. The player agency that made the game such a haunting, personal experience is reduced here to a cinematic gimmick. The “Butterfly Effect” is gone. In its place, a wheel spinning in place.
Clover, our protagonist, is supposed to ground the film emotionally. She’s grieving her sister, fighting her own inner darkness, and gradually unraveling as the loops repeat. Ella Rubin gives a solid performance, but the script doesn’t give her enough to work with. The psychological angle — particularly the idea that Wendigos are born of emotional despair and depression — is introduced with potential, but quickly discarded in favor of more visceral scares. What could’ve been a character-driven horror becomes one more exercise in bloodletting.
The rest of the cast exists to serve the structure. Odessa A’zion brings energy to Nina, and Ji-young Yoo as Megan shows early promise, but none of the characters have room to grow or surprise us. They’re written to die, not to develop. Acting-wise, no one is outright bad — but no one gets the chance to be good either. Dialogue swings between exposition and cliché, and the rare emotional beat is undercut by the looming expectation that another death is just minutes away.
Visually, the film delivers. The practical gore is impressive. Faces melt, limbs tear, throats are slashed in ways that recall ’80s horror excess, and it’s clear Sandberg knows how to stage a bloody scene. Benjamin Wallfisch’s score adds menace when needed, and the film has a slick, occasionally eerie visual palette. But like everything else, the style doesn’t serve a deeper purpose. It’s horror as display, not as storytelling.
There are nods to the game, of course. Peter Stormare reprises his role as Dr. Hill. Josh Washington’s file appears late in the film. And the final shot — a car approaching a snowy lodge — gestures at the beginning of the game. These details are meant to connect the film to the broader universe, but they feel like bait more than tribute. For fans of the game, they might spark a flash of recognition. For newcomers, they’ll mean nothing.
And that gets to the core issue: this movie isn’t for fans. It may use the name Until Dawn, and reference its mythology, but it doesn’t respect what the game achieved. It doesn’t understand what it meant to play a horror story where you made the wrong choice. Like so many other video game adaptations before it — Max Payne, Hitman, Resident Evil — this one adapts the frame, not the feeling. It recreates moments of fear, but not the mechanics that made them meaningful.
What’s worse is that it could turn new viewers away from the original. Someone seeing this film with no knowledge of the game might assume it’s a hollow IP. But the game is anything but. It’s emotional, complex, morally weighted, and still one of the best cinematic horror experiences ever released on console.
I didn’t enjoy this film. It failed to pull me in. I wasn’t on the edge of my seat. I didn’t care who lived or died. Even as a semi-slasher, it lacks tension. Some individual scenes work, and the variety of horror on display will entertain casual viewers. But there’s no emotional center. No one to root for. No story that sticks. Just death, blood, reset — until the credits roll.
This is a movie built from a brilliant premise and a beloved game. And somehow, it ended up being just another loop.
Rating: 4.5/10 ★★★★½☆☆☆☆☆.