Critics Have Seen Until Dawn. Did They Survive The Night With This ‘Ridiculous Grab-Bag Of Carnage'?
Horror fans have been absolutely feasting so far this year, and with more genre flicks like Sinners and Hell of a Summer on the 2025 movie calendar, that's unlikely to change anytime soon. One of those upcoming horror movies is Until Dawn, an adaptation of the popular video game, and critics were able to screen the film ahead of its April 25 release. Let's take a look at what they're saying.
First reactions to Until Dawn called the movie a blast, especially if seen with a crowd, and our own Eric Eisenberg mostly agrees. The plot revolves around a group of friends being brutally murdered by different horrifying creatures every night unless they can survive until sunrise. In CinemaBlend's review of Until Dawn, Eisenberg compares it to snacking on appetizers at a cocktail party — you get some satisfying bites but never feel satisfied. He gives it 3 out of 5 stars, writing:
The film is undeniably a love letter to scary storytelling, and it's built in such a way as to try and capture the many different facets of it – with a central premise that allows for exploration into a wide variety of nightmares. There is a great deal of passion to it to go along with a strong foundation, but it's also a movie that isn't quite able to reign in its vast potential and bites off more than it can chew with its scale. The result is a feature that is enjoyable but also feels like it could have been… more.
Kristy Puchko of Mashable says the movie tries to mirror gameplay as it explores horror subgenres, but like CinemaBlend's critic, Puchko says that despite some intriguing bits, Until Dawn as a whole is a 'gloppy mess.' She continues:
At first, the time loop seems a clever way to bring an element of the original gameplay into the theater. In a lot of video games, the character dies and gets bumped back to the beginning of the level (or save point), and the player uses what they learned from this failure to get further the next time. … There's just two problems with this time-loop device in the movie Until Dawn. For one thing, that's not how the game worked. … The other, bigger issue is that the movie gives up on this device partway through, and for no apparent reason.
Alison Foreman of IndieWire grades the Until Dawn movie adaptation a B-, saying director David F. Sandberg misunderstands what was so fun about the video game, betraying it with thin characters, weak scares and plot holes. Foreman continues:
Caught between Cabin in the Woods and the mystifying Serenity, Until Dawn makes countless gestures at being an incisive horror comedy — some good, some bad — but works better approached as a full-blown spoof. If that was the intent here, a better name might have been something like Video Game: The Horror Movie (or maybe Horror Movie: The Video Game: The Horror Movie?) A self-aware original moniker that could not only better prepare audiences for the ridiculous grab-bag of carnage to come but even help sell the highest-scoring moments in this baffling attempt as camp.
Chase Hutchinson of IGN agrees, giving it a 'Mediocre' 5 out of 10. The critic says Until Dawn is more disappointing than deadly, leaving all the promise of the horror game behind for a jumble of horror-movie re-creations. Hutchinson writes:
Until Dawn shares a title and some key details with the game that inspired it, though it mostly tries to do its own thing – to mixed results. While Annabelle: Creation director David F. Sandberg is able to find moments of bloody fun and tension – particularly in the way he shoots darkness – the lackluster script he's working with isn't doing him or the movie any favors. It isn't a total disaster, but as it pushed its one-dimensional characters through a cycle of horror cinema's greatest hits, I wished that the morning could come as quickly as possible.
Nick Schager of The Daily Beast says to 'Skip This,' as the film gets lazy after a few deaths by showing a montage of kills via cellphone video, and elsewhere, its concepts are so tiresome that Until Dawn raises the bar for how bad a video game movie can be. Schager continues:
David F. Sandberg crafts a gory riff on Groundhog Day, trapping a group of friends in a nocturnal cycle of mayhem and madness. His whirligig contraption, however, lacks any sense of internal logic and is even lighter on surprising scares, dispensing only clichés that are as moldy as the haunted house in which his characters are confined.
While Until Dawn's premise does give the filmmakers a way to showcase all different kinds of horror within one movie, the critics seem to think the overall effect isn't very impressive. That said, there's no doubt that the movie includes plenty of gory kills and fun hijinks that might just keep genre fans enthralled for 103 minutes.
If this sounds like a movie you want to check out, Until Dawn hits theaters on Friday, April 25.
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