Until dawn does too little while trying to do too much

It happens too much Up to dawn. Director David F. Sandberg tried to make a faithful adaptation of the popular video game 2015, a Marmot day-Style repenting-day film, a comedy, a drama with something to say about the trauma and a love letter to each horror sub-genre of all time, while at the same time. But the by-product of all this ambition is a film that never finds an identity, and ends up feeling more generic than inspired.

The film follows a group of teenagers during a road trip to help a member, Clover (Ella Rubin), cried his sister, who disappeared more than a year earlier. But while most groups thought that the trip would be therapeutic, Clover secretly investigated the last place of his known sister and put the group on his track. This leads the five adolescents to an abandoned mining city called GLORE VALLEY and to a mysterious manor which seems separated from the rest of the world in a way.

When the group enters the manor, they realize that something strange happens. They see photos of dozens of people who have disappeared in the city, they sign a strange golden book, they notice a hourglass on the wall. And finally, they are all brutally slaughtered by a killer with a mask. Suddenly, they are all magic transported at their first moments in the manor, with memories of their murders that persist. After a few additional deaths of different types of monsters, the group realizes that to escape this bizarre place, they will have to survive, you have guessed it until dawn.

In the third or fourth reset, each with a power of a new type of more interesting horror film, it is difficult not to get excited. Up to dawnit seems, exactly tells us what it is: The cabin in the woods encounter Marmot dayA parade of horrors where every fresh night brings something new and terrible. Of course, it’s not at all the game, but it is easy to see the promise in this premise. Adding to this is the fact that Sandberg remains an excellent director of horror sets. The monsters that arise during the first days of victims in the house are not particularly original, but Sandberg is incredible to find new ways to build tensions with cinematographic tips, even when we already know the fate that our characters will meet each day of rehearsal.

Sandberg and his writers frequently charged Up to dawn Like a love letter to horror films. And for the first half of the film, it really feels that. It is not exactly a question of reinventing slashers, monster films or other sub-genres he explores, but everyone feels fairly well designed to make the affinity of filmmakers Claire.

But just when we settle in to watch this group of characters die again and again when they slowly unravel the secrets to survive, the film suddenly abandons the premise, jumping for several days. Rather than looking at what happened these days, he revealed that a character, Abe (Belmont Cameli), filmed the group’s misadventures on his phone, and we see brief clips of some of their other dead.

These clips are by far the best work the best and the most scary of the film. They have magnificent practical effects and terrifying creatures, such as an invadative green from the skin that infects its host with a hideous black goo, while another sees the gang chased by a frightening man in a trench and a mask, moving in a way that feels entirely inhuman.

It would be one thing to relegate these sequences to this brief assembly of mobile phones sequences if it seemed that the rest of the film was filled with new horrors. Instead, Sandberg passes the rest of Up to dawnThe execution time of the execution explains to us painfully its world and its tradition, and find a new background of deeper rock in the plague “horror as a metaphor of traumatology” which has infected gender in the last decade. The only brief rupture that we obtain from this prolonged bore comes when the characters are sometimes continued by the most subled monsters in the film. All this leaves the distinct feeling that somewhere, trapped on Abe’s mobile phone, is a much more frightening and more exciting version of this film.

At the end, these first days of reset and those we see via mobile phones sequences resemble a cruel joke. It could be excused if what replaced him was just as interesting, or even unique. But instead, Up to dawn Obtains a final that could have adapted as the third act to any lower Blumhouse offer.

THE Up to dawn Video games are a wonderful story of unique horror with a fascinating folklore and great fear, and a changing story based on players’ decisions. The game even attracts intelligent twists and turns to avoid our expectations of what could come in a Slasher or Monster film by entirely exchanging a new sub-genre. It is perfectly understandable that a direct adaptation of the history of this game has never been on the table for this film. And the excellent premise of the film’s rehearsal day resembles a perfect compromise for the mechanisms of choice of the game. In the end, however, Up to dawnThe adaptation of the film does not fail because it is not faithful to the game. It fails because it is boring, in a way that the game was never.

Up to dawn Open in theaters on April 25.