By Seth Lukas Hynes
Until Dawn
Starring Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino and Peter Stormare
MA15+
4.25/5
If A Minecraft Movie is a great video game adaptation but a poor movie, Until Dawn is both an excellent horror movie and and a great spin on the 2015 game.
On the trail of her missing sister, Clover (Ella Rubin) and her friends find themselves trapped in a time-loop and murdered over and over again.
Until Dawn’s horror is a solid mixture of jump-scares and slow, eerie build-up, with fantastic practical effects and sparse, crisp sound design to really put you on edge.
The well-developed characters are flawed without being hateable (you want them all to survive, which is rare for a slasher-type movie), and balances their helplessness with a sense of discovery (and just a dash of morbid comedy), as they explore their death-loops and myriad terrors and try to overcome them.
At first, the Until Dawn movie seems to have nothing to do with the game, which is about college friends being hunted by wendigos (monsters from Native American folklore) in the snowy mountains.
With the main characters trapped in a house and dying on loop, the trailer looked more like a Sims movie.
Thankfully, the film has enough in common with the game – gloomy early twentieth-century art direction, gory deaths, themes of entrapment and psychological manipulation, the central monster threat and Peter Stormare in the cast – to be worthy of the name, and is more of a spin-off in the same universe than a direct adaptation.
The tension sadly dips a little in the third act, as the plot doesn’t stick to its own rules for the time-loop or mutating curse (or the masked killer’s durability).
Playing in most Victorian cinemas, Until Dawn is a creepy, clever horror film and one of a growing number of good video game movies.
