Starring Ella Rubin, Peter Stormare

Directed by David F. Sandberg

Screen Gems/Playstation Productions, in cinemas now

A year after Clover’s sister has disappeared, her friends find themselves trapped in a mysterious house where they are repeatedly murdered, but have to survive until dawn… if that makes any sense… which it doesn’t.

The only thing more pointless than playing a video game, is watching someone else a play video game. And the only thing more pointless than watching someone else play a video game is watching someone else who has downloaded all the cheats play a video game. If you spot an annoying contradiction in that intro, it’s entirely deliberate, encapsulating the experience of watching David F. Sandberg’s dreary survival horror, Until Dawn.

I’m not a gamer, so some might say I’m not the right audience for a movie based on a PlayStation game… except it is a movie, so it ought to stand on its own two feet. Once again, any ungainly use of metaphor is entirely deliberate.

Okay, so the set-up is par-for-the-course teen horror stuff. A group of friends get stuck in a creepy house. There’s The Jock, the Funny Fat One, the Cynical Maverick, the Sex-Kitten, and of course the Sensitive Ingenue (please feel free to add your own offensive stereotype). Oh no, my mistake, the kids in this movie are nowhere near this interesting, in fact, they so dull you can barely tell them apart. Anyway, they’re looking for Clover’s sister who disappeared a year ago, and they get a clue about where to find her from the Spooky Old Timer (Peter Stormare) in the Spooky Old Gas Station.

Anyway, anyway, they go to the place he suggested which is in some sort of rain-proof time bubble (why?) and all get killed (not a spoiler) and keep getting killed but the point of the game is that they have to not get killed too much otherwise they really will be killed… or something.

Hmmm. A lot has been written about the recent Netflix sensation Adolescence – a serious drama about the roots of toxic masculinity in boys and young men. For me, one of the show’s most powerful lines has passed largely without comment. In the third episode, the psychiatric evaluator asks Jamie, the 13-year-old on remand for fatally stabbing a classmate, whether he actually knows what death is. Following the news it seems as if not a week goes by without a child somewhere in the country fatally stabbing a contemporary. I’ve often wondered whether these children have any real understanding of the irreversible nature of the crime they’re committing, or whether they think that somehow a ‘life’ is something you can regain simply by going back to the start of the level.

I’m not suggesting for a second that Until Dawn would encourage anyone to do anything malign – except throw their popcorn at the screen just to liven things up – but predicating the story on the idea of how many ‘lives’ the characters have, doesn’t just add to this idea that death is inconsequential, but destroys any sense of narrative urgency. If characters just regenerate every time they are killed, then where’s the jeopardy?

I’m guessing there’s a puzzle element to the PlayStation original whereby you have to work out how to survive each level (or just download the cheats), but if that’s the case, it’s completely missing from this supposedly narrative iteration. When the denouement, such as it is, does finally plod into view, despite an incomprehensible speech about the nature of fear, it doesn’t appear to be dependent on anything the characters have learned along the way, it’s quite literally as subtle as a sledgehammer.

And the ending? In order to avoid spoilers of any kind I simply invite you, dear reader, to imagine me rolling my eyes.

To be fair, I’m missing the point here. The real problem with Until Dawn is that it isn’t frightening in any way whatsoever. If the characters aren’t actually dead, then what is there to be afraid of? Perhaps aware of this fundamental flaw in the story, Sandberg has attempted to replace jeopardy with jump scares, however he does this so often that by about half way through and the 57th time a ghoulie thing has leapt out us, it barely warrants a flinch.

Verdict: If you don’t have anything to do tonight, I can suggest far more entertaining ways to fill the time Until Dawn. Your own nightmares will be scarier, especially if they involve being trapped repeatedly in a cinema being made to watch this tedious movie. 2/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com