Film Review: UNTIL DAWN (2025): Gory Video Game Adaptation Feels Like it’s Treading on Familiar Ground

Until Dawn Review

Until Dawn (2025) Film Review, a movie directed by David F. Sandberg, written by Blair Butler and Gary Dauberman and starring Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion, Ji-young Yoo, Belmont Cameli, Maia Mitchell, Peter Stormare, Lotta Losten, Mariann Hermanyi and Willem van der Vegt.

To call the new video game adaptation, Until Dawn, the Groundhog Day of horror movies would be insulting to Groundhog Day. We are over 30 years past the time when a time loop story line was genuine novelty and though modern day horror audiences may appreciate the premise at the core of Until Dawn, the new film ultimately feels stale and trite even if the young performers who have been cast in the picture seem to have the energy to keep the momentum moving throughout. If the story of director David F. Sandberg’s film was any good, this team of actors may have had a reason to act inspired, but this movie’s story line feels DOA despite some scary scenes that don’t really gel in the grand scheme of things due to the lackluster plot employed at the base of the movie.

Ella Rubin is featured in the movie as the depressed Clover whose mom is now gone and whose sister, Melanie (Maia Mitchell) has gone missing. This film centers around a group of friends who gather and travel to the last known whereabouts of Melanie for answers. She signed the small town guestbook where these people go to try to find pivotal information. She signed the book a few times over, in fact. This movie succeeds at creating a vision of a nightmare coming to life from a visual standpoint, but that’s it. This picture’s execution is all cheap thrills, gore, jump scares, wash and repeat.

Though the movie has an attractive cast of young people, the theme of dying over and over again feels exhausting and the movie’s pacing can be sluggish at times, leaving viewers wondering when something that isn’t meant to shock the viewer will happen. We get death scenes that feel cold and mean-spirited and this may be the point as death is not a happy thing, but the film is very repetitive as you would expect it to be and doesn’t have the substance of something like a Groundhog Day or a Happy Death Day to keep it interesting.

Our characters need to stay alive until dawn to escape the time loop; hence the movie’s title. Unfortunately, you’ll feel you were up until dawn watching these characters go through the same situations albeit in more gruesome ways each time. This film has a mysterious story line but gets bogged down in its jump scares and shock value which undermines its integrity. You’ll hope the hour glass this film showcases runs out fast so you can get back to what you were doing before the movie started.

That’s not to say that the cast isn’t at least somewhat on-point. Odessa A’zion serves as the spunky Nina, Michael Cimino and Belmont Cameli are the resident charismatic and handsome guys on board with three letter names (Max and Abe) and a young psychic woman named Megan portrayed by Ji-young Yoo is here as well. These folks are amateurs in some respects, though, when compared to old-timer Peter Stormare who knows something about this would-be franchise if his ambitious, mysterious performance as Dr. Hill here is any indication. Stormare is the odd-man out, but he looks like he fits right in here in this bizarre picture.

A major problem with this film is the clownish look of the main villain. This film could have used a more sinister series of baddies to help keep the action moving. This movie yearns for a Candyman, a Freddy or a Jason to center the action and make it leap off the screen. Instead, we get stock villains that look like they’ve come right off the assembly line of video game monsters for a lower-budgeted horror film such as this one.

This film gives off The Blair Witch Project vibes and The Descent vibes, but it lacks the quality of those two previous efforts from many years back. The posters of the characters featured at the end really reminded me of the Blair Witch marketing campaign which is probably similar to how this film is trying to sell tickets. It’s trying to get audiences in to see what will be discovered as the characters try to stay alive against all odds, but the movie bites off more than it can chew in trying to please video game fans more than psychological horror movie aficionados.

While some of the characters are one-note and thin, it’s probably fair to single out both Ella Rubin and Odessa A’zion who clearly have more to offer cinema than what is displayed in this run-of-the-mill horror movie. We’ve come to expect a number of stars will originate from mediocre horror movies like this and it’s possible either one of these ladies will make it very big because of their performances in Until Dawn. Whether or not better things are to come for them remains to be seen, but for audiences looking for a great horror film, there’s so much better out there than this retread of countless other horror pictures. You may have not seen all the themes incorporated here in the same movie before, but you’ve seen them in individual pictures. This movie just merges as much as it can together to make people forget they’ve basically seen this one before, only done better.

Rating: 5.5/10

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