A Time Loop that Doesn’t Loop

The trope of teens going out to a cabin in the woods and then getting picked off is well worn at this point. Obviously it was started (or, at least, made about as perfect as it could be) by The Evil Dead, but plenty of other films have taken the concept and run with it. It’s teens, who are already the prime fodder for horror movies, out in the woods where they can’t get any help. No phones, no cell service, no internet. Then the horrors come and they have to try and survive at all costs. It’s potent and effective which is why it gets used over and over again (see also: Cabin in the Woods). Until Dawn is just the most recent film to use the setup (and I’m sure by the time I put this article online there will already be another film using it as well).

But, at first blush, Until Dawn (the 2025 film based on the video game series of the same name) isn’t just a cabin in the woods setup. It’s also a Groundhog Day-like film, adding a splash of time loop shenanigans to the cabin setting. The teens arrive, they die, they arrive again, each time trying to remember what happened before and how they can avoid all the dangers that befell them. And all of that is so the movie can have the same “feel” as the video game, where you could play the story over and over and make different choices, which would affect the plot of the game.

That’s noble, in theory, but somewhere along the way the Until Dawn film lost track of just what kind of story it was trying to tell. It’s a cabin in the woods thriller, except it’s not just one cabin but a whole town. It’s a slasher movie, with a creepy killer stalking the kids. It’s a time loop movie, except the loop never actually repeats and the kids can’t learn lessons each time because the point isn’t to do better, it’s simply to scare them. The film has a lot going on, but in the end none of it really amounts to anything at all. It’s a mess of a film that, at its core, doesn’t even adapt the video game it’s supposed based on, making it an abject failure from all aspects.

The film does start interestingly enough. Our group of college students – Ella Rubin as Clover, Michael Cimino as Max, Odessa A'zion as Nina, Ji-young Yoo as Megan, and Belmont Cameli as Abe – have come out to the remote Glore Valley in search of Clover’s missing sister, Melanie (Maia Mitchell), who vanished a year before. Stopping off at a gas station they encounter the station’s proprietor (Peter Stormare), who points the group over to a small mining village where her sister might have last been seen. A heavy rain storm hits, though, and they’re forced to find shelter in a small inn out in a remote part of the valley.

And that’s where things take a nasty turn. As Nina signs the guest book at the inn, Abe finds a wall of missing people posters that include Melanie, and Clover thinks she sees something out in the rain. But then a slasher killer in a porcelain mask shows up and slaughters them one by one with clinical precision. And then, just as quickly all of the teens wake right back up where they were as Nina signs the guest book, now singing it one row down from her previous signature. New horrors emerge, the kids die, and then they wake up again right where they were with Nina signing the next row down. Over and over, as the terrors continue and the kids start to change. Can they escape their repeating fate, slowly turning into monsters, or is this where they will all die, trapped in the Glore Valley for the rest of their lives?

I like the concept of Until Dawn. Pairing a time loop concept to the cabin in the woods setting is intriguing. It would allow for a lot of playful pokes at the time loop idea, different horrors showing up as they dodged previous ones, each time trying to learn what’s right and wrong before they die. There’s a cool setup in that idea, but that’s not what the film does, despite waving towards it. The creative team specifically noted that if they did that then the horrors stop being so horrifying because, over the loops, you learn what is coming and you stop getting freaked out by it.

Honestly, that feels like a cop out. There’s nothing stopping the characters from going in a different direction and finding some new horror to kill them, which changes their reactions and causes new deaths. Good writing could create a very tightly plotted carnival of horrors that loop and bend and whorl around themselves, meaning the characters could learn certain things, but their choices then change how other horrors happen on their loops. That’s still playing to the time loop idea while allowing for changes and scares to still happen naturally. That’s not what this film does, though.

As an example, the kids are all offed by a slasher killer in the first loop. But then he doesn’t show up on the second loop immediately, and one of the kids is swept away by a magical force before getting condemned by a witch, and the others then get killed by her, or the slasher who eventually wanders onto the scene. The next time they hide from all the dangers, nothing comes to kill them, and the water in the pipes kills them after they drink. Why? That’s never explained, it’s just one of the quirks of this town.

At seemingly each turn some new horror is introduced, but it’s never actually explained why or how. Oh, the film tries to handwave it away by saying it’s the “magic of the wendigo”, a supernatural force that the mad doctor at the center of it all – Dr. Hill (Stormare), who was also the attendant at the gas station, it should be noted – is studying. He needs the victims to go into Glore Valley so they can fall into the loop and he can see what happens to them as they die over and over again. But when you compare that setup to what happens on screen, none of it makes sense, and certainly none of it is scary.

Crap just happens for no reason. Why is there an immortal slasher killer stalking the kids (some of the time)? Why is there a witch across the road from the inn? Why is there a giant creature living out in the woods? How does any of this relate to the ill-defined “wendigo”? The film keeps throwing things at the screen to be scary, but when there’s no rules for how anything works it actually ends up being less scary overall. We need some rules, some grounding for what’s going on, or everything just becomes noise.

And that doesn’t even get into the biggest issue with the film: how is it that Dr. Hill knew to be at that gas station, on that day, at the time Clover and her friends would arrive in search of her sister. As we learn, they’d been on a long road trip for a while, just driving around, searching for Melaine. We learn this because they tell us that, but we don’t know what clues led them here or why they expected to find her in Glore Valley. They also stopped at the gas station by sheer happenstance, so what happens to his plan for them if they don’t stop. Presumably he wants Clover specifically (we learn he even has files on her at one point) so this isn’t just a random chance encounter between them. But it all happens by chance and the film just as easily could have ended with the kids driving past the gas station, heading off to Upper New York, and never going into Glore Valley at all. Nothing in this film makes sense.

When you compare this to the video game, which was tightly plotted and had a huge number of choices you could make that would affect the story, it feels like the people making this movie didn’t have a clue what they were doing. This isn’t the kind of film you could fix with a little massaging; at its very center it has a bad script that doesn’t trust its own instincts or the story of the game it’s adapting. The creative team thought they knew better and, in the end, made something so much worse than the original video game.

There’s a tiny kernel of an idea that I like in Until Dawn, but that one small spark isn’t enough to light up the whole film. This is a shitty movie that gets shittier as it goes on. No one thing ruins the film, it’s every choice that brings it down. The best way to fix this film would have been to scrap the script and start over fresh. Instead it came and went without anyone noticing or caring, and, if we’re lucky, this will be the end of this failed adaptation.