Reviewed by Alicia Glass 

Based on the Playstation video game of the same name, the movie features a group of friends hunting a missing sister, finding themselves trapped in a mysterious town with a murderous time loop, where they have Until Dawn to escape it. 

So Melanie’s been missing for a whole year, before her sister Clover (Ella Rubin) and her ex-boyfriend Max (Michael Cimino), and their friends would-be psychic Megan (Ji-young Yoo), skeptical Nina (Odessa A’zion) and her new squeeze the psych major Abe (Belmont Cameli) decide to go looking for her. A video on Mel’s phone leads them to a gas station and general store with a grim proprietor (Peter Stormare), who informs Clover that people tend to go missing in the nearby mining town of Glore Valley. After a drive through some seriously strange weather phenomena, our Scooby gang ends up having to take refuge in a subtly malicious visitor center. 

Things that are generally known in the horror world as cluex4s are all over the visitor center – the eerie guest book, the wall filled with Missing person posters that contain zero information other than a picture, and perhaps most important, a large hourglass mounted to the wall. And very rapidly the first round of death-by-masked-psycho happens, starting with the video-taking Abe and ending where it all began, with Clover herself. 

But wait! Yes our gang of friends were all entirely murdered horribly, you bet, but they all proceed to awaken in the visitors center on what turns out to be the first night, more or less hale but now each with their own signatures in the guest book and Missing posters on the wall. Just sitting around hiding from the various monsters is doing nothing, attacking back doesn’t seem to be doing a ton either, so our gang has to figure out an answer to these overlapping mysteries while enduring time loops of death, as they learn from one of the horrific residents, they have to “Survive the night, or become part of it”. 

So for those of you who haven’t played the video game, time for some fairly massive spoilers. You were warned! 

Glore Valley was a mining town that sank into the ground after a mining catastrophe that they themselves likely caused, like the entire town up and disappeared, and one Dr. Hill (also Peter Stormare) was brought in to act as a therapist to the survivors. Instead, Hill proceeds to conduct horrific experiments on the survivors, basically setting out to intentionally create a wendigo, a monstrous creature from Native American Algonquin mythology that distorts a human into a cannibalistic grotesquerie. And apparently, it took thirteen long days and nights to achieve some kind of distorted success, so that’s exactly how long our deteriorating gang has. 

But even these revelations have underlying meanings behind them, and though she brought a few somewhat dubiously helpful friends with her, in the end this boils down to being all about Clover. The movie seems to imply that Clover’s obsession with finding her sister Mel is not a good thing, and she suffers from a bunch of other unresolved mental issues as well, which makes her perfect fodder for a place like what the remains of Glore Valley turned into – a cursed cesspit for monsters, demons, and all things terrifying in the darkest of nights. 

The film suffers a great deal from making many of the monster-kill scenes as dark as possible, so dark in fact that even if you’re watching it in a room with all the lights off, it’s still very hard to see what happened to Nina in her 5th death go-around or whatever. The videos recorded on Abe’s phone of previous nights wherein our Scooby gang die in many different diabolical ways is pretty good, and it might’ve been better if the film expanded on those a bit more. But for fans of the first-person POV-style of horror video games, Until Dawn the film is a rip-roaring organ-exploding scream of terror, and delight. 

See if you too can survive the night, catch Until Dawn on Netflix now!