Until Dawn

Directed by David F. Sandberg, Until Dawn follows a group of friends, including Ella Rubin’s Clover and Odessa A’zion’s Nina, as they find themselves trapped within a time loop of death and violence. It’s promising subject matter that’s employed to increasingly underwhelming and flat-out unwatchable effect by Sandberg, as the filmmaker, working from Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler’s screenplay, delivers a sluggishly paced and generally impenetrable effort that squanders its appealing premise to a distressing (and palpable) degree – with the arms-length atmosphere heightened and perpetuated by a progressively baffling narrative and uniformly one-dimensional, generic protagonists (ie nobody here is sympathetic in the slightest). And while the picture has been peppered with a very small handful of entertainingly broad digressions, including (and especially) a fun segment wherein the various characters spontaneously combust, Until Dawn predominantly comes off as a hopelessly misguided disaster that seems unlikely to appeal even to fans of the video game on which the film is based. (And this is all to say nothing of the infuriatingly dim visuals that remain a distraction virtually from start to finish.)

1/2* out of ****