On the 1,889th day of March 2020, I watched Until Dawn in the cinema. It’s been over as year since my last time loop movie. This was a borderline case – but I was persuaded when the script explicitly referred to Groundhog Day to claim it wasn’t the same.
A group of young people are following the trail of a friend who has gone missing. After so many revisionist slasher films, it’s weird to see the genre done so straight. There’s the harbinger in a gas station, like in Cabin in The Woods. There’s an overhead shot of a car driving down a wooded road, like in every horror film ever.
The world-building of Until Dawn makes very little sense. The teens are murdered by a variety of different horror tropes, then find themselves returning to the start of that night. Each time, they are more damaged than before, slowly fading. In some ways, it’s refreshing to see a horror film that cares little about plausibility and focuses on producing interesting moments. The were some well-constructed jump scares. There’s even a found-footage section which is so short that you wish the director had made more use of the format.
Until Dawn is based on a videogame. Apparently they made significant changes, but it still feels like one, particularly with how they characters learn more about the world. At one point there’s a video cassette and a convenient player, so you can almost see the icons on them for the characters to interact through.
As a time loop, this is a very loose one – certain small elements are repeated, but other elements of the night change significantly. Mostly, this is a film that uses the time-loop trope to do its own thing. Time loops are now so established that they can be quickly set up for the audience, which is interesting in itself.
Statistics
- Length of first iteration (in film): not recorded (I was in the cinema)
- Length of second iteration: not recorded
- Reset point: all five main characters die
- Fidelity of loop: huge changes between iterations and the characters fade with each loop
- Exit from the loop: someone escapes from the loop or the characters’ life-force is fully drained