Movie Review: UNTIL DAWN

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: April 25th, 2025 / 04:03 AM

UNTIL DAWN movie poster | ©2025 Sony /Screen Gems

Rating: R
Stars: Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Ji-young Yoo, Odessa A’zion, Belmont Cameli, Peter Stormare, Maia Mitchell
Writers: Blair Butler and Gary Dauberman
Director: David F. Sandberg
Distributor: Sony/Screen Gems
Release Date: April 25, 2025

While this isn’t technically part of the plot, the characters in UNTIL DAWN, a feature film adaptation of the 2015 PlayStation video game, come pretty close to realizing they are characters in a video game.

In the film, directed by David F. Sandberg from a screenplay by Blair Butler and Gary Dauberman, we meet a young woman we’ll later learn is Melanie (Maia Mitchell), being pursued as she tries to dig her way out of an underground passage at night. She succeeds, only to find a clown-masked figure with a blade towering over her. “Not again,” Melanie pleads.

It’s a year later. A car is driving over a long road through heavily wooded mountains. Melanie’s sister Clover (Ella Rubin), one of the car’s occupants, is still searching for her vanished sibling. Clover’s friends accompanying her, who variously either support the search or want Clover to have closure, are her ex-boyfriend Max (Michael Cimino), possibly psychic Megan (Ji-young Yoo), loyal Nina (Odessa A’zion), and the driver, Nina’s psych major boyfriend Abe (Belmont Cameli).

The quintet wind up at the Glore Valley Visitor’s Center, pretty much all that’s left of the town after it mostly collapsed into the ground after a mining disaster. (Has anyone done a thesis on the significance of mining disasters as back story in horror? They are plentiful.) When the sun goes down, the five are all attacked and murdered by a masked killer.

And then they are all alive again, where they were at the beginning of the night. It doesn’t take long for everyone to realize they are trapped in some kind of time loop that they must figure out how to escape or, as one villain warns them, they will become part of the night.

So far, so GROUNDHOG DAY/EDGE OF TOMORROW/HAPPY DEATH DAY. The chief difference in UNTIL DAWN is that the types of menace change from one night to another, so what worked against one menace won’t work against another.

This is more or less how video games work, of course – except that’s not the case with UNTIL DAWN. If a player character dies, the game must be completely restarted to play again.

UNTIL DAWN the game begins with an explanation of the butterfly effect, a term used to describe how one small action or event can fan out to create multiple huge changes. The game doesn’t allow for repeat lives, but it emphasizes choices and the relationships between characters.

The film UNTIL DAWN can’t very well provide the viewers with the same kind of choices that game players get, but it also doesn’t do an especially visceral job of depicting how the characters are bonding through their shared trauma.

The friends are mostly loyal from the beginning, except Abe, who takes some convincing that it’s not wise to go off on one’s own in this type of situation. It’s gratifying not to sit through a bunch of interpersonal nastiness, but not much changes between these people from start to finish.

The varied dangers, in theory, should keep both the characters and the audience on their toes. In practice, though, this means that it’s hard for these people to pick up too many clues, so we don’t get the detective aspect that seems like it ought to be part of the experience.

Even more problematic is that we never get a satisfactory explanation of exactly how or why all of this is happening. If the set-up were different, there might be a way of getting around it, but because of the information we do get, we wind up perplexed.

The acting is good, the monsters are creepy, the gore is plentiful, and it’s a pleasure to see Peter Stormare reprise his role from the game. There are a series of “Missing” flyers for people who’ve disappeared in the Glore Valley, and UNTIL DAWN commendably uses these in its end credits to give picture shout-outs to its creatives and crew.

There’s a nice assortment of things going bump in UNTIL DAWN’s multiple nights, but given its potential, we can also see where it might have been more compelling.

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