If anything, watching this movie makes me want to play the video game that much more. I rarely get myself too excited for movies based on video games, let alone one I haven’t played yet. Surprisingly, Until Dawn is very serviceable. I had just finished watching Triangle, another time loop movie and so I figured why not go for another one.

The premise is simple: a group of friends are looking for a missing person, and their search brings them to a remote and secluded house. Things get weird, and before you know it, a killer dude with a clown mask kills everyone. Because, yeah, why not. However, they all somehow return to life and find themselves stuck in some sort of time loop where they must survive until dawn if they are to escape back to the real world. It’s simple, but it worked out okay. There weren’t cringy parts from what I can remember, so at least there’s that.

It wasn’t until midway through the movie that they included some scenes that I personally thought would have made the movie much better if they had gone in that direction from the beginning. When the group looked at the recorded footage on their phone, it showed some really cool scenes in a found-footage format. As a fan of found-footage films, I immediately sat up straighter in my chair to take it all in and see what creativity they could bring to it. The few quick scenes it showed, such as when the worm crawled into Clover’s face and the flying ghost/monster thing appeared while they were stuck in the tunnel, were some of the best scenes in the movie. Of course, I’m heavily biased here, but I just couldn’t help thinking about how different the movie could have been if they had gone with the found-footage format from the beginning. I also understand that this type of format can be a big risk, and it may not have made sense, given that the video game wasn’t in first person to begin with. But one can always hope…