Until Dawn (2025)

Until Dawn arrives as an adaptation of a 2015 video game that was itself a feature-length horror movie with a controller, and the film solves this redundancy by becoming a different horror movie entirely. A group of friends search for a missing sister in a valley that swallows people, and they are murdered, one by one, by a masked assailant, then wake up at the start of the evening to be murdered again. Thirteen deaths, a wendigo or two, an exploding body. David F. Sandberg directs with the tidy efficiency of a man assembling furniture from instructions he wrote himself.

The ensemble is younger and more varied than the genre typically bothers with. A woman leads, and actors of color occupy substantial roles. Nothing is made of it. The story does not pause to explain itself, and no character delivers a speech about what their presence signifies. The emotional engine is a pair of sisters, one vanished, one searching, which supplies the film with a pulse without ever arguing a case. There is a feminist reading available here, in the way Clover drives the action and makes the hard calls, but the film declines to make it. It is too busy killing her.

Which is the honest summary of the whole enterprise. The mining disaster that sank Glore Valley and produced its monsters is backstory, not indictment. Nobody lectures. Nobody eats the rich, though one character does explode after drinking tainted water, which is as close as the film comes to a thesis. This is a haunted house ride with a good cast and a clever clock. It asks nothing of us but attention, and it repays that with diminishing returns. A minor pleasure, competently served.