Until Dawn (2025)
Can you stay alive?
My regularly scheduled plans were thrown into turmoil when i spent a good 3 hours after working doing farm work today, so by the time I got in to do a movie it was very much a “click the first movie I don’t have to buy and get it done” kind of night. How did that end up with tonight’s movie you might ask? Well, I’m guessing it might have something to do with it not doing the greatest in the box office leading to such a seemingly early release to Netflix - or perhaps I just lost all sense of time and it’s actually been around long enough it really should be put out on there. One could only hope I’ve not struck a ground hog situation myself, but at least the only thing I need to do is sleep instead of survive Until Dawn.
Never played the game, but I did watch some folks play it. I loved the idea of the wendigo and all the extra elements it dragged into the game during it’s run of choose your own adventure runtime, punctuated by real time mess-ups leading to the unexpected. When I heard a movie was getting made, i thought to myself “that makes a lot of sense, it’s basically a movie you interact with anyways.” Heck, far as I know they even had access to the actual game people for input - and somehow everyone decided that outside a few easter eggs this thing was going to do it’s own thing but keep the name. Well, prepare to follow a group of attractive young adults on a quest to find one’s missing sister, only to get trapped in a doomsday night of repeating horror where they live, die, and live again. Survive the night or become the night - how long will they go before all hope is eclipsed?
Actors do a decent job here. Considering the larger portion are all faces I don’t recognize (although that’s not saying much with my memory in fairness). Still, they do a pretty good job with what they got - although I would like to throw out the caveat that people’s mileage is going to vary greatly on this one. See, I don’t really think it’s necessarily the actors themselves as much as just how things are written. This being the case, when you aren’t supposed to like someone it’s usually super effective, and at times you may find yourself wondering about character-side things like interactions between the main crew (like taking 5 minutes to realize someone is missing, when by the second cut of the scene I had already asked the question), but it’s not because the actors aren’t selling it.
Characters are what they are. There’s dynamics between them, but it’s more like how a given character is related to the others - with the exception of our lead who gets at least some face-level depth thrown at us when the movie feels like being philosophical. Besides that though? Pfft, not the right horror movie for that kind of stuff. There’s the one that’s maybe psychic ( and that’s pretty much her defining characteristic), the one that’s all logic and wanting to get back together with the main, the one that’s the mains buddy and her current boyfriend whose a bit of an asshole even when he does have a point. The interest levels are not generated by our characters in this one, but rather the mystery of the events playing out. This kind of fuels the above thoughts from the actor section - they can’t exactly make their character the most thought-out feeling person in the universe when their screen time is “unfortunate accidents” amidst brief interplay about how they are going to get out of the situations. It does try a few times, and how effective it is will be hit or miss depending on just how annoyed you are with the characters by then. To be fair to the movie, this isn’t something that’s never happened in a horror movie before - in fact it usually plagues the heck out of the slasher genre specifically - but that doesn’t mean I’m just giving it a free pass for mediocrity.
Waterwall
Where things start getting better is anything physical. The main costumes are everyday sort of stuff - that modern gear that doesn’t really stand out at all but looks the part. The setting also starts pretty common place, but as the movie goes we get more and more stuff. Villains get to have a couple of different looks and forms - complete with would-be wendigo that ties it back to it’s namesake to some extent. It actually has a few different things that call out to the game or other things spread about - nothing quite as obvious as Jason showing up or anything like that. The setting gets to have a bunch of cool stuff as well actually, with some giant sink-hole set up that gives reasons for all manner of underground action - even if the majority of time is the main building and it’s immediate outdoors. That outdoors likes to experience little changes as it goes as well - although I think one of my favorite parts about the outdoors is the wall of rain. I’m a sucker for storms sometimes, so it’s just up my alley.
Of course, with any horror movie promising plenty of deaths, we get a good deal in here. At a certain point it does kind of putter out, skipping multiple “rounds” to get to the final run. This means you get a good three or four sets of kills in varying ways, which is enough to be interesting and provide some visual carnage for the gore hounds - but also perhaps not enough to really get them excited by the time it putters out. It does look pretty good, although some do look less good than others. My personal favorite is the water section, as it somehow ends up being really funny in a sort of morbid way - but I never claimed I didn’t have a dark sense of humor. The humor of the movie might be hit or miss as it commonly is given an individuals sensitivities, but intentional or not I did get a few laughs in. Creature design gets to have some fun, but also largely suit-people kind of stuff.
Audio is balanced well enough, especially after i turned up my headphones so i could hear things better. I don’t know what it is about a long day that makes you loose your hearing, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the movies fault (perhaps Netflix is just quiet on my computer). Line deliveries are pretty good, as is background audio. Music was there - i think - although I also really don’t remember any of it. That’s pretty much the norm for me, so nothing against the soundtrack department - between being tired and doing what I could to focus it probably just faded into the background as emotional support music generally does. Now, if you are looking for a super thoughtful movie, I don’t know if this is necessarily the right one for you, but I do think it’s trying to say at least something about the power of friendship, the will to survive, guilt, and some other mental stability kind of stuff. Again, I don’t normally look for the stuff all that hard, and you can imagine that when I’m tired I could be making half of it up like some kind of weird thinking-too-hard hallucination.
Whose sneaking who.
I thought the movie would be a lot worse. What I ended up with was a pretty mediocre movie that had a few okay laughs and effects, and an interesting setting. Characters didn’t have much to do, but that’s not an unexpected thing for a slasher-style movie, and if I was looking for more of a character-focused movie I’d probably chase something like Happy Death Day instead. Still, it does feel a bit of a let down that the name feels like it’s trying to draw me in based on what I know of the game, and it’s delivering something somewhat tangentially related with the same name instead of a live cinematic version of the game. Playing with the reset to emulate a player reloading saves to try and get the “Good ending” is a good way of doing it without fully devoting to a Bandersnatch style mega-long choose your adventure movie though. I think the movie may have saved some of the flak it got by having a different name (even though the premise is still “survive until dawn” so the name works), but either way it firmly sits in that spot where the average horror person could probably catch it by accident on a lazy weekend on Netflix and still have a good enough time they don’t regret it.