Until Dawn | Film Review

 

A year after the disappearance of her sister Melanie (Maia Mitchell), Clover (Ella Rubin) takes a group of friends back to the place Melanie was last seen. But when the friends are attacked by a masked killer, only to discover that they are living the same day over and over again, they have to find a way back home before they die for good.

I knew this film was based on a game but I've never played it, so I didn't really know what it would be about. I also hadn't heard much about it since it came out, which is not usually a good thing.

This was an average film. There were a few good things, but it definitely had a lot of flaws.

I was immediately invested in the mystery of where Melanie was, which is something the film did really well. Even though we didn't know the characters well, we knew who Melanie was and we wanted to find her as much as they did.

There were some great visuals and transitions. For the most part it was shot in a really creative way.

I thought the scares in particular were done well - it doesn't just rely on jump scares and actually puts work in to make the actual environment scary for the audience.

But then there are the flaws...

The story is a bit messy and all over the place. You can't really connect with anything that's happening because the film never finds an angle that it can stick to.

As mentioned, we don't get to know any of the characters. And this is fine when we're focused on finding Melanie, but when the story becomes completely about the friend group, we need to know them in order to care about them and the film doesn't let us.

But in addition to that, the characters don't feel believable as friends. This could be because we don't know them, or it could be down to the writing or acting, but the chemistry just wasn't right between this group. They spend a lot of time telling us how close they are rather than showing us.

Overall, a stronger group of friends that we really love would have made this a much better watch. I've since looked it up and many fans of the game say that the film doesn't do a good job of representing it, so maybe sticking closer to the source material would have made it better too?

4/10