Metacritic reviews

It's a thrilling ride, and the fun the production is having with itself is contagious. There are moments of humor and necessary breaks in the tension that let us laugh and allow us to get braver alongside the characters.

The filmmakers have made a movie which, while not being particularly deep, manages to be fresh, engaging, creepy and fun. For a mainstream horror flick adapted from a game, that's a feat in and of itself, but what gives "Until Dawn" extra heft is its meta, existentialist twist on the monster mash, making the film not the best, but the most horror movie of the year.

Caught between “Cabin in the Woods” and the mystifying “Serenity,” Until Dawn makes countless gestures at being an incisive horror comedy — some good, some bad — but works better approached as a full-blown spoof. If that was the intent here, a better name might have been something like “Video Game: The Horror Movie” (or maybe “Horror Movie: The Video Game: The Horror Movie?”)

For maybe half its 103-minute running time, maybe even a little more, Until Dawn gets by on its spookhouse variety and surprising humor.

As entertaining as Until Dawn is, it’s fairly light in most regards, other than the kills. While the characters in the game had more time to have intricate connections to one another, these five are fairly one-note.

It’s held together by Sandberg, a director who has mastered the art of totally competent studio horror with slick, equally forgettable films like Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation and he again shows himself to be a crisply efficient commercial film-maker again let down by a far less effective script. For a film all about repetition, one viewing will suffice.

Until Dawn is more disappointing than deadly, leaving all the promise of the horror game behind for a jumble of horror-movie re-creations.

Lacks any sense of internal logic and is even lighter on surprising scares, dispensing only clichés that are as moldy as the haunted house in which his characters are confined.

The director, David F. Sandberg (“Annabelle: Creation”) does an exhausting job moving along a script, written by Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler, that’s made slack by mediocre monsters, muddled time loop stuff and underdeveloped characters who seem straight out of a lesser “Goosebumps” episode.

The terrible script so often steals the spotlight that the gory, by-the-numbers filmmaking putting it into action is almost besides the point. Sandberg, for his part, can stage an effective horror sequence.