Until Dawn

Die, die, die again. Die, die, die, die, die... Die some more, then die again. Supermassive Games' iconic horror game today offered us a little odd twist on an otherwise rather one-sided genre, where we experienced the events of that cursed house of horrors over and over again, with personal choices, puzzles, and the consequences of our choices, in a savage mix with evil, sudden, bloody deaths. Making a film out of it was certainly no simple matter. In that sense, perhaps I should be a little... kinder, with Shazam director David F. Sandberg. But at the same time, I'm not feeling very kind today.

Until Dawn is not great. It's not good at all, and thus an insult to the game it's based on. The story begins in a car, on a road trip, towards Blackwood Mountain. Friends Clover, Max, Abe, Megan, and Nina have gone there to try to find their missing friend Melanie, who was reported missing earlier that autumn in the same area. Once there, of course, they encounter killers who slaughter them, over and over and over again. Die, die, die, die... And die again. Everything dies.

Granted, this film is well made visually. Sandberg is good at this part, aesthetically. He has sculpted a big, dark house without being Silent Hill-gloomy, and he shows off the borrowed PlayStation 4 killer with copious amounts of blood and guts. The set design is awesome and many of the brutal murders are fun to watch. But, what he fails to do, is to do the game any justice, when it comes to the basic concept itself. Here, the kids who die, die, and die again don't learn anything, they don't seem to realise anything and despite having died 12 times already and now getting a 13th chance, they all just make impulsively idiotic decisions that leave the viewer screaming at the screen in desperate despair. "Not that way, you stupid bastard!".

Until Dawn is thus a very typical teenage slasher without character, failing to capture what makes the game so likeable and failing to create tension, nerve, or any kind of originality. Thus, without the fancy set design, it would offer nothing of value, at all.