User reviews

I was honestly really curious about the movie at first - the game is one of the best horror experiences I've ever had. Unfortunately, my hopes were already crushed after the very first trailer, and after watching the film, I can only say: it was even worse than expected.

The beginning actually isn't that bad: a few cool, crazy deaths, a mix of different horror genres (slasher, ghosts, monsters), and a bit of a Groundhog Day vibe that made it genuinely fun for a while. For a moment, I thought maybe they'd just do their own entertaining thing, even if it had nothing to do with the game anymore.

But then... the movie completely falls apart. After just three nights of horror, the whole story suddenly gets skipped over. There's no buildup, no development, no tension. Instead of becoming clever or making survival feel exciting, the characters just randomly stumble through the plot. Everything becomes flat, boring, and absolutely uninteresting.

And then the biggest joke: at the end, the movie desperately tries to somehow tie itself into the Until Dawn lore. But it just feels cheap and completely disrespectful to what made the game so special. No emotion, no real danger, no real characters - just empty shells wandering through a story that doesn't even take itself seriously.

Such a shame. The basic idea had real potential if they had just stuck with the fun, creative tone from the first half. Instead, we got one of those typical "we know better than the original" disaster movies. A complete waste of time and money.

Another 2025 release. Another sigh as I leave the theater. Just to be clear, I'm not part of the "movies aren't as good as they used to be" crowd. But 2025 has been the weakest year I can remember (excluding the theater shut downs in 2020). And it's even more frustrating with Until Dawn because it had potential.

We've seen this premise done a hundred times. But it seemed like they were going to modify the usual route by including various types of horror subgenres, which intrigued me. Until they throw that concept out and just start throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks... which ends up being almost none. Everything feels generic.

And of course we have a ton of extremely stupid things to make fun of, both with bad writing, and characters who alternate between being idiots and just being lame. By the end I was completely unengaged. The jump scares stopped making me jump, even in Dolby Cinema where the bass makes the chairs shake. I just didn't care.

Aside from a few cool horror elements, some successful jump scares, and a few enjoyable shock factor moments, I had a terrible time with this movie.

(1 viewing, opening Thursday Dolby Cinema 4/24/2025)

The only reason I wanted to watch it was because I loved the game. But the movie has nothing to do with the game. I gave it 3 stars just because I've seen worse, but I was truly disappointed...

The plot was weak, the characters were weak, and the atmosphere was lacking. I really tried to enjoy it, but it was just too boring. I don't understand how they could ruin such a good idea (the one in the game) and turn it into... this. It's really hard to find anything good about it. Anyway, I feel dissatisfied because it gives the game a bad reputation too.

Anyway, it was a weak movie. If it didn't have this name, maybe people wouldn't have had any expectations. But in this case, it's just a big, big letdown.

If you made it past the 30 min mark, I commend you for your resilience... I mean, where do I start with this movie... Basically it's just a movie with verry terrible plot points just to get a chance show a bunch of creative gory killing without having to have a large cast to pay for.

The characters are a bunch of really dumb college students, with Very low common sense skills.

Extremely Poor dialogue... Mentioning obscure movie plots without tell us what they're talking about... Reference to "possession" with obviously no basis of knowledge... And ultimately a plot that makes ZERO sense... "You either survive the night, or become a part of it??" But wait, did they not just already die like 5 times each...? So.... they didn't survive the night ne right, or what...?

Again it just goes back to having a verry poor plot point just to show a bunch of gory killings... If you want a popcorn movie to take your girlfriend to and not think or even pay attention, this will do just fine.

A lot of video game to film adaptations kind of just drift away from the source material and it seems like the makers are completely deaf to the fact that the game fans want more faithful renditions, for whatever reason. Until Dawn is no exception, taking a pretty much perfect horror game and deviating pretty deliberately and egregiously from the setting and story established there. Why? Who knows other than maybe wanting to do their own creative thing but in this case it really doesn't help their cause because the game was so damn great. Nighttime vista shots of the snowy Canadian Rockies, vicious wendigo zombies, Peter Stormare being creepy, shifting metaphysics, Hayden Panetierre, a Larry Fessenden cameo, young Rami Malek, the game had it all and the film almost wilfully loses much of it in translation. To its credit it still has Peter Stormare being creepy and some wendigo zombies but gone is that atmospheric mountain setting and honestly sometimes all it takes is a choice like that to completely kill off any wind in the sails. Hell the game even had a haunting rendition of the Stanley brothers O Death with vocals by Amy Roekel over chilly opening credits that were a hundred times more cinematic than anything found here. Filmed in drab rural Hungary, the mighty mountain aesthetic gets replied by a depressingly familiar small town one as several bickering teens get caught in a not so trippy Groundhod Day-esque time loop of murders, monsters and mayhem orchestrated by Stormare's unhinged mad scientist. The creature effects are good, there's a funny running gag with some Scanners style spontaneous full bodily explosions and the tone tries to keep it fun. But the teen actors are all lacking in the kind of lasting personality that people like Malek and especially Panetierre had in the game and the sense of creeping mystery and encroaching doom are replaced by a manic momentum that can't sustain itself from jumping the track. The game was about as close to perfection in an immersive horror experience as you can get, but this film just ain't it, and should have trusted its source material enough to be more like it.

If Saw (2004) and The Evil Dead (1981) had a baby togheter, but it was an abortion, this movie would be that baby.

This monstrosity fails in almost evey aspect of what a good horror should be. The lowest points are for sure the Story and the Characters. Only the special effects are decent.

Every single jumpscare fails to deliver due to a simple but crucial plot mechanic that alinate the viewer from feeling any sense of real danger.

The monsters seem randomly generated by an AI or taken from different unrelated movies and put togheter for this occasion.

After 1 hour in the Theatre I was already yawning and eyeing the nearest exit.

It was bad.

The plot is shallow and meandering, with little sense of urgency or purpose. What should have been a tense, atmospheric experience ends up feeling dull and drawn out.

Character development is practically nonexistent, leaving the audience with flat, forgettable personalities. Without any emotional investment, the stakes feel low, and the horror elements fall completely flat. Rather than building genuine suspense, the film leans heavily on cliché jump scares that feel predictable and ineffective. I can imagine that even fans of the game may find it hard to stay engaged.

In the end, the film feels like a missed opportunity-uninspired, unscary, and ultimately boring.

This is nothing as good as the video game. I wish the movie had more characters and was at the same place as the game. The title didn't make any sense since the characters could stay alive. I wasted my unlimited pass for this with free popcorn and lemonade. The storyline was so stupid and made no sense. All the gore made it resemble another saw movie with Talk to me mixed in with it. This is one of those movies that don't have a better outcome than a game version. The characters didn't look like they even wanted to be at this mysterious medical center or whatever it is. This movie would've made better sense if it were more similar to the game.

I wish there were some warning signs. For someone who is sensitive to flickering lights, a solid hour of this movie was unwatchable. Came out woth a huge headache even when I didn't have my eyes open for a lot of it. If i knew I wouldn't have gone in to see this in theaters. Yes it is horror so some jumpscares are to be expected but it wasn't that. It was the constant light flickering and camera zooming in and out, shifting viewpoints, absolute disaster. For the live of frick, stop shaking the camera! Took away so much potential for this story.

Besides this, I bet a lot of people enjoyed this.

If you want to see a bunch of annoying kids experience a whole lot of random nonsense, oh man do I have the movie for you.

The main problem is that for most of the running time, everything that happens is completely random, making it impossible for the movie to generate any tension or cohesion. Add the bad acting and the cheap looking props and you have a movie which biggest mystery is how it even got greenlit and why Peter Stormare agreed to be part of it.

In a just world this would be a title on the bottom of a supermarket bin with discounted straight-to-video movies, but in 2025 this is worthy of a theatrical release.

Until Dawn, the video game, isn't exactly a masterpiece of writing but what it does do well is take tried and tested horror movie cliches and use them in an interesting way that feels right for that medium. Until Dawn, the movie, on the other hand uses every horror movie cliche in the book and executes it in the most equally cliched way imaginable. I don't know what happened here because it's a horror movie without a tone or an atmosphere and I was in utter shock at how relentless miserable I was while watching it. I didn't think I'd watch another movie this year I hated more than Minecraft but in just over month I managed to find something else that made me hate my life more for it's entire runtime.

Phones losing reception, character taking slow walks down dark corridors and masked killers walking slowly towards their running victims are just a few of the countless horror staples this movie not only manages to use but also totally butcher. It didn't make me go "oh they're doing that" it made me go "oh they're doing that". David F. Sandberg has shown he's got chops in both horror and comedy but nothing he does behind the camera had any kind of effect on me, at least not the one he intended. It's flat and lifeless from beginning to end and even the jump scares stopped having any kind of an effect on me after a while.

When it tries to be mysterious it fails, when it tries to be scary it fails and when it tries to be funny it fails (and I'm putting it mildly on that last one) because that's all it kept coming across as; like it was trying to be those things. I was one of the few people who saw the trailer and liked the idea of time loop angle. I don't think a literal adaption of the game would've done this movie any favours and I thought changing aspects of the story for this medium would be an aid to it. But like everything else it fails miserably because this movie has no idea what it's trying to do and just continues to throw all of these concepts and creatures at the wall and none of it sticks. Every new creature was more underwhelming than the last and every new introduction gave me whiplash in all the worst ways. Peter Stormare's few brief scenes were the one of the only things that ever peaked my interest and if it weren't for him I'm not sure I could list a single redeeming quality.

But I could accept all of that, all of it, if there was at least one thing about it I could root for (other than for it to finally end that is). I didn't just find the characters in this movie to be annoying I actively despised them and there was not a single redeeming feature about any of them. The characters in the game could be unlikeable at times but that felt by design and that's not the case here at all. The game took time to build up their connection but the film just starts without any reason to get behind them and they just feel like non-entities with absolutely no chemistry. They're horrifically incompetent and cruel to each other and there was nothing about them I found to be worth saving. The acting is horrific which I don't usually like saying but I just can't deal with it here and I know it's an overused criticism nowadays to say something feels like it's written by AI but that's exactly how the dialogue felt. The one thing driving these characters is tossed aside in the closing scenes and they even try to build a wholesome connection between the cast towards the end and all it did was make me cringe in the most intense way possible.

I'm under no illusions that easy to make any kind of a movie but I don't understand how something this bad gets made when there's genuinely solid source material to draw upon. The film just pissed me off from the first scene to the final one and it's one of the only films I've seen in recent memory that felt like a genuine waste of my time. I don't know what happened here or who looked at this script and thought it would be anything other than complete garbage but not since Madame Web have I been this in awe that a film got made to the quality that it did, at least Minecraft has the box office receipts to justify it's existence. If I see another movie in 2025 I hated more than this one I won't just be surprised, I'll be genuinely amazed.

I'll just start off by saying that I've never played the video game in which this film is based off of so I wouldn't quite say this is going to be an entirely fair review because I'm strictly going off of the movie and not elements of the game itself. The one good thing I have to say about Until Dawn is that it feels like a bit of a throwback to 2000s teen slasher/horror movies like Wrong Turn, Cabin Fever, etc. So in that general regard, I found that mildly refreshing because that's not something I've seen in a while. There were also some pretty spectacular gore sequences. That being said, the story (regardless of being based on a video game) is an exact replica of 2012's Cabin in the Woods. The only difference is that this film is charmless, devoid of humor, not very well acted or plotted, and so brazenly self serious that it becomes tiresome. It took me about 10 minutes to start fidgeting back and forth on my phone because I was becoming so restless with how tedious and contrived this film was.

D-

I get the thought process but the execution of this idea was not great and the actors made it much worse. The looping idea could've been doable if the people involved could manage to convey emotions. Plus, the aggravating cliches that fully populate this film drive me insane. It's more than just "don't go up the stairs!" It's more like "wtf are you even doing right now?". Every time these actors had to interact with each other it was like watching a high school drama class fumbling through lines and over acting everything into the ground. Even when they make comments to sound "self aware" it comes across forced. Just bad.

I think a lot of the ratings on here are coming from people who just enjoyed the ending. If you take out the last 10 minutes of this film, it's absolutely horrible. The acting is subpar at best. There are so many holes in the plot that I would lose count on two hands. All of that said, the ending is great. Very imaginative and I will not give any spoilers but even I would say it is worth watching just to see how it ends. Not what you would expect. That's the only reason it's getting three stars instead of one out of me. I'd say if you have an hour and 45 minutes to waste, this isn't a bad way to do it necessarily. I think it could have been done much better and much cleaner.

This may not be what you're expecting. You see a horror movie score above 5 and, most likely, you think: "Oh, not bad for a horror flick, I'll give this a try." But, as with most horror movies, it's a flip of a coin-and in this case, for me, I dropped the coin down the drain and now I've lost a dollar. I'll be quick:

The bad parts:

-The main issue is the writing. The storyline is confusing-they're trying way too many things at once. Sometimes it's about the masked killer, sometimes the Wendigo, sometimes an old lady or other stuff. It's all over the place.

-I didn't feel any connection to the characters. They mostly feel like box-ticking stereotypes. I just didn't care about them. Meh.

-If you played the game, don't expect the same feeling. Do that, and you'll leave disappointed-like me. Until Dawn has plenty of references to the game; a lot of the ideas are here, but again, it's all over the place.

-The cheap jumpscares. I'll let you see them yourself.

The good parts:

-Peter Stormare is here-decent performance, as usual. Also, the reference to the game? Nice touch.

-There's a full set of scenes shot in a kind of "found footage" style. That part was more engaging than the rest of the movie. Honestly, they should've just stuck with one of those ideas instead of throwing in the entire horror trope catalog for an hour and a half.

Why make a videogame adaptation and get 'creative' with the story when you have everything already? You could do a prequel, or a sequel to the game, or follow the original storyline like with the first season of The Last of Us? I mean, it worked for them. Look, if you like corny 2000s horror movies, you might like this one. As a horror fan (of both movies and games), this was a no from me. At least I managed to finish a couple of sudokus during the movie.

3 cookies out of 10. (Chocolate chip. Stale)