Until Dawn

A group of young adults on a roadtrip take a wrong turn and end up trapped in a time loop, where they are forced to try to avoid being brutally killed by a myriad of monsters. Their only hope of escape is to last… until dawn.

So…

Emotionally damaged main girl, Clover, her sensitive guy ex-boyfriend, Max, her friends, Megan, the woo woo psychic chick, and Nina, the one with a tough exterior to mask her soft interior, and also Nina's latest dude boyfriend, Abe, are all on a roadtrip. And being that they’re all packed into Abe’s SUV, you know the inside of that vehicle smells fucking crazy in there, nothing but feet, hormones, cheetos, and farts. Anyway, the idea behind the trip is to retrace the last known steps of Clover's sister, Melanie, who's been missing for a year, in the hopes that it may give Clover some closure, as she has been struggling with her sister’s disappearance.

They stop at a gas station in a place called Glore Valley, which was the last place that Melanie had sent Clover a message. While there, the super creepy gas station attendant, a man given to whistle a creepy tune at any given moment (played by the always welcome Peter Stromare), tells her that people go missing near Glore Valley all the time. Just up the road, in fact…

Since these kids are dummies, they ignore the Harbinger's Warning, not to mention several other bright red flags, and wander off the beaten path. After that, they touch some things they shouldn’t touch, and do stupid shit they shouldn’t do, all in places they shouldn’t be, and of course… things go badly for them, as they are then forced to learn the hard way, over and over again, that next time they should try taking their heads out of their asses, and heed the obvious bright red flags.

So y'know... the usual set up.

The dummies soon realize they’re stuck in a time loop. But this isn’t like Groundhogs Day, or Russian Dolls, or Palm Springs, where the infinite loops eventually turn them into ageless and almost omnipotent gods, and only once they achieve spiritual enlightenment are they finally able to ascend to Nirvana. No, this time loop is full of all kinds of different monsters, and each one is trying to kill the dummies, and usually does. So, Until Dawn is really more like Edge of Tomorrow, where they must learn from every death if they want to survive the whole run, and also kind of like Source Code, Happy Deathday, or Happy Deathday 2U, where each death also contains a potential new clue to unlock their prison.

Y’see, there’s this fancy hour glass on the wall, and every time they get killed by one of the plethora of monsters awaiting them within the cursed confines of Glore Valley, it resets.

But if they can all stay alive until the sands run out…

First it’s a Hill Billy murder-clown. And then they come back, bruised but alive. Then it’s an old witch woman. She tells them the rules: survive the night or become a part of it. Then there’s a massive hunched creature lurking in the shadows of the woods. There might be werewolves. There’s definitely a bunch of creepy old dolls, some of which look like clowns. It also becomes clear that the turning of the hour glass, and their resulting repeated deaths, are taking a toll on them. Next, they all discover that the water is bad… meaning that, if you drink it, you explode. Why? I don’t know. The night repeats, and the assorted horrors of Glore Valley continue to change. One night, they accidentally watch porn in mixed company. Then there's the old sanitarium. There’s a rusty bear trap. There’s wendigos.  And zombies. And worms under their skin at one point. And slender man. And more wendigos. One night, they bleed from eyes. It goes on and on like that.

Finally, there’s a dark and scary tunnel, because it turns out, just like any time that one finds oneself in a shitty situation…

The only way out is through.

Because it turns out... this is all connected to the town’s old mine disaster, which collapsed many, many years ago in 1998, because apparently that was a long time ago now. I’ll pause here for a moment, in case you want to turn to dust because you just weren’t expecting to be suddenly reminded that you’re now older than dirt...

Anyway, I don’t know if I missed the explanation of the mechanics of the time loop, but apparently it‘s all some kind of twisted psychological experiment run by the creepy gas station attendant, who isn’t actually a creepy gas station attendant at all (or at least, he’s not just a creepy gas station attendant), he’s also the creepy psychologist in charge of the experiment too. He records everything in the Valley, and by watching some old tapes, the kids find out that, after 13 nights in the Time Loop, most people end up turning into monsters. Unfortunately for our heroes, it just so happens that they are now on their thirteenth night in the Time Loop too, so you can probably guess what’s coming next...

That’s right, it’s the 3rd Act.

The group flees through the tunnel and into a bunch of noise and loud music and running about and stuttering lights and wobbling camera work. In the end, they all manage to escape just before the hourglass runs out and the sun rises, ending the time loop. Finally, after the kids have driven away, the audience is threatened with the possibility of a sequel, as we hear more creepy whistling and Glore Valley's security system turns back on.

While there’s definitely people out there–mostly people with a stake in the film’s success–who will excitedly call this film an "R-rated love letter to horror movies," it’s actually just a pretty weak-sauce adaptation of a video game I’ve never played, but one that looks like it’s a bastard child of Silent Hill. It’s apparently a very loose adaptation of a video game too, one that, from the various promotional materials and interviews that came out before the film’s release that I saw, it initially had a potentially interesting idea for adapting the game.

In a nutshell, each time the clock re-sets and the day starts over, the events would be depicted in a new and different style, like each new day was a different kind of horror movie, making this a veritable horror movie smorgasbord. Unfortunately, that somewhat novel idea was subsumed at some point by the film’s uninteresting central mystery, not to mention by its general lack of interesting horror variations, as the whole thing is presented in the same flat CW television show style.

On top of absolutely failing to deliver on its general concept, the script doesn’t even resolve any of the characters’ intra or inter-personal conflicts. Does Clover save her sister? No. Does she come to terms with her sister’s death? Nope. Did Clover and Max patch up their relationship? Definitely not. Did Max reach a place of closure with the loss of that relationship, where he can now let it go and move on? Uh-uh. Did Nina address her serial monogamy, or whatever the trauma was that she carries that makes her so needy? Negative. Did Nina ever think about Abe’s multiple betrayals, and what that means for their relationship? No sir. Did Abe ever ask himself why his girlfriend killed him at one point, sacrificing him to a Hill Billy Clown Psychopath when he forced her to make a choice between him or her friends, and the sociopathic entitlement within himself that would cause him to assume that things would’ve worked out differently? Not that we ever saw. Did Megan… did Megan…? Did Megan even have an implied character arc or conflict? That’s gonna be a no from me, dawg.

Now, obviously, going into a lackluster slasher movie and expecting full and satisfying character arcs from your teen murder victim characters is silly, I know this. But here’s the thing, these "Stuck in a Time Loop" stories are supposed to be about the characters’ inner journeys, and the repeated time loop scenarios are the cycle of samsara, where the point is to break free from the endless cycle of death and rebirth, and become a better person. To achieve enlightenment, so to speak. And to not even make a nod towards doing that is a pretty big whiff as far as the quality of this Time Loop film's script goes.

But then, maybe that’s just the unfortunate reality of this film being an adaptation of a video game.… where the purpose is not to grow and become better, it’s merely to make it to the end.

Also, the pre-release press was just tooting their fucking horns endlessly about the fact that this film had an R rating, and how it was going to go so hard, and people better be ready for how extreme it‘s going to be. And that, A. is not the case at all. I mean, this is just not a scary film at all. It is safe as milk, kids. As in, sit down and enjoy your sugar cereal and watch cartoons, y’know? But even worse, B. it turned out to be one of those “oh so extreme” R rated films, where there’s no nudity, but there is a ton of gory violence, and that always feels like an inadvertent and creepy commentary on American society and what it is we’re actually the most afraid of.

So, just an all-around yawner, y’know?

Plus, why such a focus on wendigos?

Wendigos are mythological creature that originated in Algonquian folklore. They're often portrayed as malevolent spirits who may possess a person (which is probably what led to the psychialogial disorder characterized by symptoms like an intense craving for human flesh and the fear of becoming a cannibal being called "Wendigo psychosis"). Other times, they‘re portrayed as human-like creatures who are occasionally said to be giant. They reek of decay, are gaunt and emaciated, with an ashy-gray pallor, and tattered and bloody lips. The main thing of Wendigos is that they suffer from an insatiable hunger, and the desire to eat humans, but their hunger is never satisfied. They're basically metaphors for the toxicity and harm that is caused by greed.

So why does the Game/Film use such a random (but also very specific, both in cultural context and general metaphor, neither of which they utilize) creature, instead of something that is a bit more generic, like a ghoul or a zombie?

For the film at least, the answer is simply… that’s how it is in the game. But in the game, as far as I can tell, there's no link to the cultural or mythological roots of the wendigo. Maybe there is, I don’t know, but I suspect that this is just another case of a creator going "cool name" and then using the thing without context. And while there's nothing particularly problematic with doing that in this particular instance, it's still kind of a douchey and lame thing to do.

And that's basically this whole movie in a nutshell.

Until Dawn is not the worst film ever, it's just subpar and pretty unremarkable, despite what my going on here at great length might otherwise indicate. It's decent enough for a run-of-the-mill “pretty kids with a monster problem” horror flick, but it's thematically empty, and nothing else in the film comes close to making up for that. Honestly, it’s mostly just dull. And this is all on top of the fact that it’s weird to see anyone trying to make a film like this in a post-Cabin in the Woods world, especially one that openly follows the exact same formula that film skewered, just without any of the commentary.

Meh. Pass.