Round Up: Until Dawn Movie Reviews Suggest PS5, PS4 Game Is Still Better
Sony’s own PS4 horror classic Until Dawn has made the jump to the big screen in the form of a fairly loose adaptation that hits theatres today, 25th April. The original game, which was remastered for some reason on PS5, is considered a favourite by many and the best work Supermassive Games has ever done.
However, it doesn’t appear the translation to film has drawn similar plaudits. The movie currently has a Metacritic rating of 53, though its Rotten Tomatoes score is sitting at a more positive 63 per cent.
Below you’ll find a selection of Until Dawn movie reviews, from the most positive to the most negative and everything in between. Let us know if these verdicts make you want to see the film or not in the comments below.
Screen Rant – 8/10
As grotesque as some of the scenes are, it’s a horror movie with a relatively happy ending. Even though we’ve seen everybody die many times over by the movie’s conclusion, you never stop rooting for Clover and her friends to get the chance to really live. You can’t fault Until Dawn for already dropping hints about a potential sequel; the building blocks of a long-running universe of terror are all there. With any luck, this strong start will be just the beginning of a terrifying universe every audience member can enjoy.
SlashFilm – 8/10
Although the film is deliberately not a repetition of the video game’s plot, it absolutely adapts the game’s implicit concept of asking the player whether they could actually survive a horror movie or not. “Until Dawn” the movie subtextually asks those questions of its viewers throughout, and with so many various beasties to encounter, the answers will vary for each person alone, never mind for multiple people. The movie’s variety is the peanut butter to that idea’s chocolate, never allowing the film to feel stuck in one mode even as it establishes its own structure. To borrow a phrase from Bobby, “Until Dawn” really does feel like the platonic ideal of a graveyard smash.
Paste Magazine – 61/100
For maybe half its 103-minute running time, maybe even a little more, Until Dawn gets by on its spookhouse variety and surprising humor. Once Clover and company start to solve the puzzle at hand, though, it becomes more akin to a dull movie of a presumably exciting game â something like Silent Hill, though never quite that lugubrious. Though the threats are obviously doled out with a love of different types of horror, the characters never feel like theyâre becoming genre experts; the movie never really ratchets up and ultimately doesnât pay off. Though the game itâs based on is of a more recent and sophisticated vintage, the movie is closer to an arcade experience: You pump in some quarters and kill some time, until one or the other runs out.
The Guardian – 6/10
Until Dawn is well-staged and entirely inoffensive, which, in a year thatâs seen horror dreck like The Monkey, Opus, The Gorge, Heart Eyes and Wolf Man, will just about do. Itâs 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.
IGN – 5/10
Until Dawn shares a title and some key details with the game that inspired it, though it mostly tries to do its own thing â to mixed results. While Annabelle: Creation director David F. Sandberg is able to find moments of bloody fun and tension â particularly in the way he shoots darkness â the lackluster script heâs working with isnât doing him or the movie any favors. It isnât a total disaster, but as it pushed its one-dimensional characters through a cycle of horror cinemaâs greatest hits, I wished that the morning could come as quickly as possible.
The New York Times – 4/10
The director, David F. Sandberg (âAnnabelle: Creationâ) does an exhausting job moving along a script, written by Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler, thatâs made slack by mediocre monsters, muddled time loop stuff and underdeveloped characters who seem straight out of a lesser âGoosebumpsâ episode.
The A.V. Club – 33/100
Horror, whether in games or in movies, is about setups and payoffs. Until Dawn is a film almost exclusively of setups, with the payoffs either mismatched or permanently deferred. In its indecision around what kind of film it wanted to turn a decision-driven game into, firing its shotgun approach haphazardly into the air, it incoherently spins itself in circles.
[source metacritic.com]
