Incredible production design! Um… did I mention the incredible production design?

A year after her sister Melanie (Maia Mitchell) goes missing, Clover (Ella Rubin) begins retracing Mel’s steps from pictures on social media posts. The Scooby gang includes Clover’s still-hopeful ex Max (Michael Cimino), spiritualist Megan (Ji-young Yoo), her friend Nina (Odessa A’zion) and Nina’s newest boyfriend Abe (Belmont Cameli). After getting directions from a grizzly clerk (Peter Stormare) who thinks he knows where Mel might have disappeared to, the group arrives at a quaint Welcome Center inexplicably surrounded by a perpetual thunderstorm. Clues begin to pile up before a masked killer abruptly takes out everyone in short order… and like a virtual save point, everyone inexplicably comes back to life. The entire valley seems looped out of time, always Saturday October 24th, 1998, except a different menace or monster appears to begin killing everyone again. Perhaps the antique in-wall-mounted sandglass clock with the giant skull has something to do with it, the one that keeps resetting itself every go-around…

If the trailers make the film feel like a combination of Silent Hill and Resident Evil, there’s a reason for that: the 2015 Sony Playstation survival horror game of the same name was intended to emulate those kinds of slasher-type films. Shazam! and Annabelle: Creation director David F. Sandberg took on duties from a script by The Invitation scribe Blair Butler and It Chapter 1, Chapter 2 plus recent Salem’s Lot writer Gary Dauberman. Advertising hints at a smorgasbord of scary tropes overloaded into an ensemble film, all falling well within “the system” as explained in The Cabin in the Woods while also championing Happy Death Day vibes. That’s a lot of directions to be pulled and pushed in… and it should be interesting to see how all that turns out in the end, right?

Similar to the problems that haunted Dead Silence, there’s more going on here than needs to be. The production design looks ready-made for Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios, ready to funnel horror fans through a gauntlet of spooky details, atmosphere, and jump scares. Our protagonist, however, immediately proves dull and indecisive, leaving audiences to endure the ensemble stumbling into clues and making questionable decisions with their findings, especially after the first round of murders. Sure, each reset might provide new insight, but it also stacks on new locations, new situations, and new dangers — plus the all the previous ones to avoid — creating too many additional choices each time around. Since survival hinges on a vague notion of figuring something out, it feels like 99% luck with too few lives or time left to work out the correct decisions. In other words, a movie based on a game demanding the best decisions be made fails to invoke that premise, stringing random events together to fill the runtime. If you’re the kind of horror fan who lives for logic, the how and why all this is happening (read: folks who enjoyed the game), you’re going to be disappointed.

Minor spoiler: there’s an oiled-brass “death clock” in the Welcome Center — it’s in the trailers — with a big ol’ grinning skull and a rotating white sandglass to mark the new night as time runs out… and not one single person ever tries to stop it, move it, destroy it, or anything. Seriously?! In spite of this obvious option, characters have no problem comparing their situation to movies they’ve seen, making immediate assumptions such as killing themselves (or one another) to ensure anyone who dies can come back. One of the best film moments is when a character weaponizes one of the don’t-do-that rules they discover, but it’s really a highlight of how ineffective anything else the characters try to do is… unless the script needs to turn the page. The ending doesn’t even try to argue this conclusion; thanks for buying a ticket! Enjoy a couple of decent jump scares, then cringe at the narrative pointing out what they think a wendigo looks like; for a far better representation, watch the movie Antlers.

The original game used motion capture and the voice talents of actors like Rami Malek, Hayden Panettiere, and Brett Dalton, plus the aforementioned Peter Stormare, the only one to reprise their game participation in the film version. There were so many better ways this could have gone, so one has to wonder if those got scrapped as being too much like other films. Maybe the better edit was left on the cutting room floor, as evidenced by the trailers using found-footage type clips out of context; hey, you have to get those money shots up on the screen, right? If no one can explain what’s happening and/or why, how is anyone expected to figure out how to survive it? Even the mid-credit reprise can’t say why the film version is almost entirely different from the original game… unless the real intent was to send filmgoers to play it, which is seriously putting controller before the console.

Until Dawn is rated R for strong bloody horror violence, gore, language throughout, and co-stars Odessa A’zion, who also plays the main protagonist in the 2022 Hellraiser, a much better movie that damn well deserves a sequel.

Two skull recommendation out of four