Until Dawn (2025) Review: Uninspired, Unoriginal, and Horrific in All the Wrong Ways

Until Dawn does everything a horror movie and adaptation can do wrong. It’s sadly pointless in its nature.

Until Dawn (2025) should’ve known better. But so many good adaptations of video games have been made in the last 5 to 10 years. You would think that they would understand by now. But until then, Until Dawn (2025) is as far apart from the game as you can get. It has nothing to do with the game’s original premise.

The Until Dawn video game is regarded as one of the better interactive choice-based games out there. It was super popular with streamers when it came out, and they recently put it back out on the PS5. The game has a pretty interesting story, and if they had done that in the film, it would’ve actually been pretty cool.

The game is a pretty perfect horror story. But Until Dawn (2025) does absolutely nothing similar to the game. They could’ve just changed the name of the movie, and you wouldn’t have known the difference. I think they should’ve just taken the idea of this movie and done something else with it, and not attached the Until Dawn video game to it.

After all these horrible adaptations in the last 20 to 30 years, you would think that they would understand by now. Think about how over-the-top and how different the original Super Mario Bros. movie was. Think about that, but instead of being so bad, it’s good; it’s just so bad it’s boring.

The Until Dawn (2025) characters are horrible. You absolutely do not care if they live or die. I’ve felt more sorry for the Friday the 13th sequel characters. The characters in the story are all as dumb as a rock. There are no scares in the movie, as they don’t understand how to pace and properly scare the audience. The pacing is all over the place, and so is the acting, the direction, and the writing; it’s just all around terrible. 

I was remembering back to one of the worst movies I’ve ever reviewed, which was Madame Web. Madame Web might not be the worst movie ever made, but it’s definitely the worst one I have ever reviewed. And I think Until Dawn (2025) might’ve beaten it. Madame Webb always had some A-list actors in it who were able to do a little something with the script. So you always were kind of rooting for them because you just knew him from other movies.

The characters in Until Dawn (2025) are boring and caricatures. I would not be surprised if this movie were written with AI. I know that term has been thrown around a lot recently, but this is so cut and dry, it really wouldn’t surprise me.

This is definitely the worst horror movie I’ve seen in a very, very long time. I have yet to watch and review the new Snow White film, and that one might be worse than this due to every single person giving it such insanely bad reviews. But as of now, Until Dawn (2025) is the worst movie I have reviewed. 

You can’t just make a stereotypical move and expect to have stellar results. The movie does nothing new, nothing original, and nothing fun. In fact, there’s a part in the film when they explained the situation they’re in as “like that one movie.” 

I really don’t understand why they didn’t just stick to the game. Even if they did a carbon copy of the game and added no originality, it would’ve been better. Because the story is there for the game, you don’t have to change too much.

Where the game had all the different endings, you’d have to pick an ending, sure, but that’s it. It wouldn’t be that hard to do because the story is already written for you. They made it harder on themselves by doing something so out of the blue. But what they’re doing isn’t original either, so it just comes out flat and bad. 

There are a lot of horror movies that come out every year that are pretty bad, but they’re at least entertaining, and they serve the purpose of going to a theater to see a horror movie. You go and watch him even though it’s not going to be that great, but they at least have a couple of good scares in it.

Until Dawn (2025) doesn’t even have that. It doesn’t even have a few good scares in it. There aren’t any parts in the movie where I was startled or even somewhat scared. I don’t get scared by a lot of movies, but I can understand how some people can, and this one definitely didn’t have any of that. 

Overall, I’m extremely disappointed in the fact that they decided to practically use nothing from the video game in this adaptation. It would be one thing if the video game sucked and had a horrible story. Or if the game had potential in its story for a film.

But it doesn’t. It just sucks. They took the IP and slapped it on something that legitimately had nothing to do with the game. It was probably written as its own thing, and then they slapped the Until Dawn name on there. There’s legitimately no other excuse.

Horror movies seem to be lacking in the last couple of years. Especially when it comes to adaptations, it seems that if a horror game gets made into a movie, it’s either horrible or alright. I think the only time it really succeeds is in The Last of Us, but that was also a TV show. The Super Mario Bros. movie that came out a couple of years ago did a good job, but that was animated.

The Resident Evil movies have almost nothing to do with the games, besides Welcome to Raccoon City, which was terrible. I think that one of the better horror video game adaptations was the original Silent Hill. It’s not that great, but it’s pretty good compared to some of the other things we’ve seen recently. 

Overall, I think if Until Dawn (2025) was called something different and then had that attached to it, it probably would’ve been a lot better. Even though the characters are still terrible, it probably would’ve been easier to digest. It felt like a slap in the face to the fans of the video game. Because of how terrible this one is, we might not ever see another adaptation of this classic horror video game.