Quick Review: Until Dawn (2025)

A video game movie that left me wanting more

Introduction:

It seems like video game movies have been the new thing that Hollywood has been wanting to tackle more of as we’ve gotten a ton of video game movies in recent years. We even just got A Minecraft Movie this month which has been huge in popularity. Until Dawn is a game that while I’ve heard of it, I’m not too familiar with the overall game. I just know it’s a game where you make choices and the choices you make affect how the game turns out. While I heard that people weren’t a fan of how the movie would be adapting this game, I was still interested with how the movie would turn out and bit curious overall with it. While the movie does seem like it’s having fun with some of the ideas and concepts, I overall felt the movie was just an average experience.

Review:

I can say that what the film does do right is the effects. There are a lot of fun blood and gory effects in this movie that are fun to watch. It caught me off guard a couple times with what they were able to pull off in the movie and I liked when it was able to do that. The same can be said with the makeup as well, there’s some fun character designs that I wasn’t expecting but I liked what I saw. I also do like the concept of what this movie goes for. The Groundhog Day trope has been used before but I thought the way that this film was trying to pull it off was something a bit new and I was on board with what they wanted to try. It overall did catch my eye with what the film wanted to do.

Unfortunately though my problem with the film is it’s lackluster in executing the ideas it has, I just wasn’t a fan of how the film was pulling off these ideas and it made it a drag to get through, It also doesn’t help that acting and writing doesn’t really compliment it. I would excuse the acting and writing more if the unique ideas it had were executed a bit better. A lot of horror movies I love have that where the acting might not be the best, but the ideas it has is so bonkers, I was on board with whatever it’s trying to do, but I didn't feel that for this film. By the end I was just waiting for it to be over. There’s a scene where they show clips of the previous nights events that have happened in a montage type of way and the stuff happening in there seemed more interesting than what we actually had to follow. I know the game doesn’t follow the same thing, but I thought the film could’ve at least pulled off something interesting with what it had, but by the end, I didn’t really care about anything. It just felt like your average horror movie with a couple of cheap jump scares and other tropes thrown in there. It overall felt forgettable by the end.

Final Thoughts:

Until Dawn has a lot of interesting ideas to play with, but I felt like it never got interesting with executing them. There is some fun in here with how wacky they get with the kills and gore, but it was overall just an average experience by the end.

Rating: 5/10