Until Dawn(**), it’s the world of Wendigos

Until Dawn – 2025
Director David F. Sandberg
Screenplay Gary Dauberman, Blair Butler
Starring Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion, Ji-young Yoo, Belmont Cameli, Maia Mitchell, Peter Stormare

Until Dawn is an attempt to bring a decade old horror fantasy game for Playstation 3 into the world of cinema. The interesting thing is the actors chosen to portray characters in the game, outside of Stromare, are fairly more accomplished than the no names they came up with. The two most prominent are Rami Malek and Hayden Panettiere.

Things as they are, the current cast does a fair job of weaving through the madness imparted upon their journey to find Clover’s sister Melanie (Rubin and Mitchell, respectively). This trek takes them to a gas station whose attendant, Hill (Stromare) tells them of Glore Valley, where many people have gone missing. Any time Stromare is introduced in a pivotal but relatively minor role, one knows they will be seeing him down the line.

The team is then besieged by a rainstorm that only lets up in front of Glore Valley’s Visitor Center. Certain things stand out in this center, most prominently, it is empty. There is also an hourglass with a skull mounted on it and, in another room, a series of Wanted posters with no names. Clover recognizes one of them as her sister. At the point when Nina (A’zion) signs the guest book, all hell breaks loose and a masked man kills all of them within minutes.

We then jump to Nina signing the book a second time, while each wakes up, recoiling from the deaths that they all experienced. Soon they die one more time, in different circumstances, while catching a clue “survive the night or become a part of it.” They now know they are part of a time loop. But one, according to the guest book, that only has 13 loops.

The concept is intriguing. In the right hands, this film might have been something. With Dauberman pulling the strings, it becomes a rush of sameness and loses steam soon after the second round. There is nothing wrong with the actors work here. They just don’t have a good script to work off. The scares are not drawn out and there are just not enough of them. There is an inventive shortcut they take including a camera phone, but some of those scenes would have been better just as experiences first hand.

This is the kind of film that might be number 2 in a marathon of scary movies. Not good enough for lead off, but not at all worth being the last memory you have of the evening.

(** out of *****)