Another video game adaptation, and this one really feels like one in the way it keeps returning to a starting point. The plot structure, however, is very contrived and not particularly original. A group of young friends drive into a secluded wooded area to try and find out what happened to the sister of one of them, Clover (Ella Rubin). The sister disappeared a year previously. Being pretty bad at this detective thing they ask the first person they meet, a creepy gas station clerk who says that a number of people have gone missing in the area and that they should check out one mysterious house up the way. This being your standard horror movie, that’s exactly what they do, and find themselves trapped in the house, which at first seems abandoned. 

The gimmick is that they can’t leave the property and can only escape if they survive until dawn, a difficult proposition given the various creatures that emerge from nowhere to slaughter them. But they keep being reborn to go through the whole horror again per Groundhog Day. This structure allows the director, David F. Sandberg, to sample all the possible slasher and occult methods that have been introduced over the years. If the movie lacks real suspense it’s not because Sandberg’s timing is off, but rather that most of the gruesome killings are telegraphed beforehand in ways you’ve come to expect by simply watching these kinds of movies. There’s a saturation point, even for people like me who don’t like horror movies that much. 

What interested me to a certain extent was the logic behind the supernatural elements. It’s obvious Clover’s sister ended up in the house and was somehow absorbed into it over time. Victims get caught in the death loop and end up becoming monsters themselves…or something like that. The deaths themselves aren’t so gruesome as they are ironic. In one scene, the various members of the search team figure out how many lives they’ve already spent and how many more they have left before the point of no return. So, of course, they try to isolate themselves in a bathroom and just wait out the night, but you know what happens next. Until Dawn is a fairly compelling gloss on the haunted house theme, but its mechanics are a bit too mechanical.

Opens August 1 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Until Dawn home page in Japanese