Until Dawn Loops Into a Fun, Forgettable Horror Ride

Until Dawn

★ ★ ★

Until Dawn is a movie based on a popular PlayStation video game. It’s a horror film, filled with monsters, violence, blood and mayhem in a town called Glore Valley. This town vanished decades ago after a mine collapse. Several people have tried to find the town and were never heard from again.

One such person was Melanie (Maia Mitchell), who set out a year ago–reeling from the loss of her mother–to find the town. That was the last time anyone heard from her.

Peter Stormare as Dr. Hill and Ella Rubin as Clover
© 2025 Screen Gems

The film opens with Melanie’s sister Clover (Ella Rubin) and her college friends Max (Michael Cimino), Nina (Odessa A’zion), Abe (Belmont Cameli) and Megan (Ji-young Yoo) on a road trip to find Melanie. They fill up at a gas station and meet the creepy cashier Dr. Hill (Peter Stormare), whose importance will come into play later. Against the cashier’s warning, the group continues down the road until they run across a town welcome center. All of this is fairly standard fare for a cabin-in-the-woods type film.

Once inside the welcome center, the doors lock and an hourglass on a wall–surrounded by gears and mechanics–turn over to start the sand timer. This is when the monsters attack. The group quickly learns they are stuck in a time loop. One by one they will die at the hands of a creepy masked man with superhuman strength and inhuman bloodthirst. The sand runs out and the hourglass flips over again. At this point, the group returns alive again in the cabin at the point just before they were attacked before. Each one remembers their deaths.

Odessa A’zion as Nina
© 2025 Screen Gems

They repeat this loop throughout the film, each time a new part of the buried town is revealed and new monsters attack.

Outside of the repeating time loop, the script follows a pretty formulaic structure for isolated cabin movies. And that’s quite okay, because it still manages to tell a serviceable story. We care enough about the characters that we want to see them escape the looping chaos. It’s familiar territory, but the filmmakers are confident in the direction they take.

The film is campy, corny and not particularly scary. So why is it any good?

Ella Rubin as Clover
© 2025 Screen Gems

Because, as horror films go, it’s fun. Perhaps it’s because the protagonists take an active role in their survival. They work to solve the film’s mysteries, as smart-mouthed college students trapped in a madhouse of horrors, and each one mostly wants the group as a whole to get out alive.

As a video-game movie, it mostly breaks the curse of mediocrity by which such adaptations tend to be plagued. You’ll see it, you’ll forget it but you’ll probably enjoy it while you watch it.