A week after the release of Ryan Coogler’s unusual, artfully crafted horror Sinners, we are now back to the industry’s genre norm with Until Dawn, a schlocky video game adaptation that has far less on its mind. Such a drastic drop in IQ and ambition means there’s no serious comparison to be made here and this weekend there’ll be no real competition at the box office (Sinners is likely to remain on top) so such contrast does ultimately allow the film to stay within its own, sillier space, a deep-fried donut for dessert after a filet mignon entree.
On its own, lower-stakes terms, Until Dawn is a passable, if rather unfrightening frightener, made with some skill and enlivened by a strong troupe of young actors, enough to notch it slightly above the piss-poor standard but not quite enough to really justify its existence. The game it’s based on has been described by the director David F Sandberg as “pretty much a 10-hour movie” but with interactive elements, the idea being that you can affect the direction of a narrative that would otherwise be fixed. There’s obviously no such gimmick here (at times one wonders what a Bandersnatch-style choose-your-own-adventure version would look like) and so instead, there’s a replication of the gaming process. In Until Dawn the movie, when the characters die they’re then brought back to life to die all over again.
