CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 4-25-25
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review six new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, April 25th, 2025.
When one of your all-time favorite filmmakers drops a new movie, the anticipation comes with a strange mix of excitement and anxiety.
David Cronenberg is one of those guys for me — a daring, fearless, audacious director whose career has spanned everything from low-budget gross-out masterpieces like Rabid, The Brood, and Scanners to the prestige horror and sci-fi classics like The Fly and Dead Ringers, and then into more "straight" dramas like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises.
Over the past few years, he's dipped back into his roots with Crimes of the Future, a brilliant and fascinating return to body horror. Now he's back with The Shrouds, and while it's not one of his best, it's still an endlessly interesting, deeply personal piece of filmmaking — and another vital entry into the incredible career of one of cinema's true masters.
The Shrouds is Cronenberg's most personal film since The Brood, which was his exorcism of a brutal divorce. This one is about grief, and it's unmistakably about his own—the loss of his wife Carolyn in 2017 after 43 years of marriage.
Cronenberg has said outright that The Shrouds is autobiographical, and it shows. Vincent Cassel, who plays Karsh, might as well be playing Cronenberg himself: same hair, same glasses, same cadence, same dry, clinical delivery.
Karsh is a wealthy tech entrepreneur who has invented GraveTech, a technology that lets you "monitor" the decaying bodies of your loved ones underground in real time—a dark, deeply Cronenbergian idea if there ever was one. The obsession with death, decay, the body, technology, and grief—it's all there. It’s pure Cronenberg.
The premise is simple but twisted: after Karsh's wife's grave (and several others) are desecrated, he dives headfirst into an investigation that spins out into conspiracy theories, industrial espionage, family drama, and some classic body horror.
Is it Chinese or Russian agents trying to sabotage GraveTech's expansion? Is it a Hungarian oligarch looking to steal Karsh's technology? Is it Karsh's brother Maury (Guy Pearce, doing a dead-on impression of Robert A. Silverman, Cronenberg's go-to weirdo character actor from The Brood and Scanners)? Or is it something even stranger?
The mystery spirals into the absurd, with Vincent Cassel's Karsh bumbling his way through half-baked detective work while dealing with visions of his dead wife's decaying body — lovingly displayed in intimate, disturbing close-up, in true Cronenbergian style.
Diane Kruger pulls triple duty as Becca (Karsh's deceased wife), Terry (Becca's conspiracy nut twin sister), and Hunny (a flirty AI avatar based on Becca). She's fantastic in all three roles, giving the film a weird, woozy, dreamlike atmosphere that fits right in with Cronenberg's lifelong obsessions.
Now, if you're expecting a gorefest, adjust your expectations. The body horror is there — corpses rotting, missing body parts, some grotesque growths, and surgical imagery — but it's not front and center like it was in The Fly or even Videodrome.
The real heart of The Shrouds is its dark satire about the funeral industry, its wry, bone-dry humor about grief, and its deep distrust of technology. (I mean, Karsh drives a Tesla, which gets mentioned and shown multiple times—something that drew unintentional laughs at my screening. Poor Cronenberg couldn't have known when he shot the film that Tesla would become shorthand for a whole lot of cultural baggage.)
The opening scene alone is one of the funniest and most twisted Cronenberg has ever done: a brutal, awkward blind date that ends with Karsh proudly showing his date a live video feed of his wife's decaying skeleton inside her grave, complete with some very suggestive growths on the nasal septum. It's such a dark, hilarious, wrong scene — and it perfectly sets the tone for everything that follows.
Technically, the movie is gorgeous. Douglas Koch's cinematography is crisp and cold; Howard Shore's score (of course) is chilly and unnerving; and the production design is peak Cronenberg clinical chic.
But as much as I admired the craftsmanship, The Shrouds is messy. The conspiracy plot is convoluted to the point of absurdity, and the big themes of grief, technology, and mortality are hammered home with little subtlety.
Some of the symbolism is about as subtle as a hammer to the head. (If you've seen Crimes of the Future or Crash, you know subtlety is not necessarily Cronenberg's primary concern.) And the ending — a strange, ambiguous shrug of a finale — left me feeling a little cold.
Still, if you're a Cronenberg fan — and I absolutely am — The Shrouds is essential viewing. It's not top-tier Cronenberg, but it's so loaded with his DNA (pun intended) that you can't help but be fascinated by it.
It's more of a companion piece to Crimes of the Future than a new landmark, but it's also a moving, weirdly tender reflection on death and loss from one of the greatest and most unique filmmakers alive.
It's a movie about grief, decay, technology, obsession, and the dead staying with us — sometimes far more literally than we might like. It's about what happens when you can't let go and when death becomes just another data point.
In the world of The Shrouds, grief rots your teeth, technology watches over your loved ones' decomposing bodies, and your late wife might still be haunting your tech devices... and your dreams.
I wouldn't rank The Shrouds with Cronenberg's best — it's not The Fly, Dead Ringers, or The Brood — but it's another wild, singular, sometimes frustrating, but always compelling movie from one of our true cinematic madmen. Cronenberg is still Cronenberg, even at 81 years old, and for that, I'm incredibly grateful. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Let me start with this: I saw The Accountant back in 2016. I know I did. I saw it in a theater, sat through the whole thing, and then walked out and, apparently, flushed every bit of it from my brain.
The only things I remember from that movie? Anna Kendrick was in it, and at some point, Ben Affleck's character mailed her a painting. That's it. Nothing about the plot. Nothing about the character.
Nothing about the apparently deep trauma and brotherly backstory that this new sequel, The Accountant 2, spends almost its entire runtime trying to flesh out. Just Anna Kendrick and a painting. That's it.
And I say that not as a criticism of my memory but to set the stage for how forgettable that first film was… and how this second one isn't much better. Actually, it's worse.
Anna Kendrick doesn't show up at all in this movie. Not even in a flashback. She is entirely absent. Though halfway through, we do get a random reference to someone doing the "cups" trick — like from Pitch Perfect — and I swear, if that wasn't a weird little Easter egg shout-out to Kendrick, then it's even more pointless than it already seems.
The Accountant 2 picks up sometime after the first film and drops us back into the world of Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), the math-genius, violence-expert, neurodivergent antihero who is part John Wick, part Rain Man, and part that irritating kid from your AP calc class who wouldn't shut up about Euler's theorem.
This time, he's roped into helping Treasury agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson, who returns from the first film) solve the murder of her former boss, Ray King (J.K. Simmons), who's gunned down in the first five minutes of the movie.
That's our inciting incident — or what it should be, but it gets so completely bogged down in a sea of convoluted side quests, tech-hacker nonsense, tonal whiplash, and poorly written attempts at humor that you'll forget why anyone's doing anything before the halfway point.
Along for the ride is Christian's estranged, overly-aggressive brother Brax (Jon Bernthal), whose character could be summed up as "what if a human punching machine had one-liners?" The two of them are supposed to have this deep, emotional fraternal connection that's finally coming to a head, but every time they're onscreen together, it plays more like a mismatched buddy cop sitcom pilot that Netflix would cancel after three episodes.
The film tries very hard to give us more of a "human" side to Christian. There's a ridiculous speed-dating scene at the beginning that's supposed to show us how socially awkward he is, but instead, it just highlights how cartoonish and robotic Affleck's performance has become.
His delivery sounds like a cross between Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and Yeardley Smith voicing Lisa Simpson after a Red Bull binge. It's not a performance; it's an affectation, and it's bad.
Also bad? The writing. At one point, Christian confronts a shady pizza magnate (yes, really) in the middle of his frozen pizza factory. He reviews his tax filings, then beats the guy within an inch of his life while his employees look on.
I was far more interested in the mechanics of the frozen pizza assembly line than the plot, which had already veered off into "we've stopped caring" territory at that point.
The story then drags us through a labyrinth of human trafficking, hitmen, satellite hacking, and a rogue assassin with a traumatic brain injury that's made her a genius codebreaker.
There's also a subplot involving a neurodivergent character named Justine (Allison Robertson), who, with the help of a group of super-genius kids, uses elaborate high-tech wizardry to tap into phones, satellites, bank records, and more.
This team of socially awkward hackers is basically The X-Men: Data Entry Division, and watching them work felt less like thrilling espionage and more like a DOGE-funded startup selling crypto-backed funeral plots on Reddit.
It's also bizarrely uncomfortable how relevant this subplot now feels in a post-Musk, post-surveillance-state world. These kids are essentially violating every privacy law imaginable — and we're supposed to cheer for them. It's unsettling in the worst way. The movie even flirts with giving this hacker kid her own superhero moment.
To break up the tech-heavy madness, the movie inserts moments of forced "brotherly bonding." The worst offender is a honky-tonk bar sequence where Affleck does an impromptu line dance to Steve Earle's Copperhead Road (which, to be clear, is a great song), gets a woman's number, and attempts to act like a real human. Meanwhile, Bernthal throws a couple of guys through a window. If you want character development in your accountant-themed thrillers, this is apparently how it's done.
Gavin O'Connor, who directed the original and is generally a solid filmmaker (his Warrior is fantastic), seems completely lost here. The action is competent, and the editing is tight.
But the movie is cold, scatterbrained, and bloated. It lurches between awkward comedy, uninspired action, and dramatic beats with the emotional depth of a W-2 form. The pacing is all over the place. The plot stops and starts depending on how badly they want to shoehorn in a "funny brother moment."
And Affleck… man. Affleck is not good in this. His choices feel labored. The voice, the tics, the stilted delivery — none of it adds up to a compelling character. By the time the movie ends, you do not care about him and are not even sure what just happened.
Will there be an Accountant 3? Probably. There's apparently a third one already in development. Will I see it? Sure. Will I remember anything from The Accountant 2 when that happens? Absolutely not. Except, of course, for that Steve Earle song. And the fact that Anna Kendrick still isn't in it.
I can't recommend The Accountant 2. Convoluted, uneven, overstuffed, and emotionally vacant. This is not the kind of movie that adds up. - ⭐️⭐️
There's a lot to admire in The Legend of Ochi, but unfortunately, not a lot to really feel. Directed by Isaiah Saxon—a music video guy making his feature film debut—this is a technically sharp, well-crafted fantasy adventure that ultimately plays like a knockoff of better movies. It looks great, it sounds great, and the performances are strong, but emotionally, it left me completely cold.
Set on the remote island of Carpathia, The Legend of Ochi tells the story of Yuri (a terrific Helena Zengel, who's quietly becoming one of the best young actors working today). She's the daughter of Maxim (Willem Dafoe, who's always, always worth watching), a gruff hunter training an army of kids to slaughter these strange simian-like creatures called the Ochi.
But when Yuri finds an injured baby Ochi in the woods, she decides to help it — kicking off a journey across the wilds to reunite the creature with its family, all while being hunted by her father and his soldiers. Along the way, she runs into her estranged mother Dasha (the always wonderful Emily Watson), and Petro (Finn Wolfhard, who's popping up in everything lately).
And let me say this: visually, the movie is gorgeous. Cinematographer Evan Prosofsky captures the dark woods, the mystical mountains, and the wide open fields with real beauty.
The creature design is mostly practical—lots of puppetry, suits, and physical effects—and it's refreshing to see something like this not drown itself in CGI sludge. The use of music is excellent, too: it sets a moody, eerie tone that feels fitting for this strange little world.
But here's the thing: The Legend of Ochi is extremely derivative. The baby Ochi itself looks like a cross between Gizmo from Gremlins and a Furby. The story—a girl finds a wounded magical creature and must return it home while dark forces pursue—could be swapped out with E.T., The Dark Crystal, The NeverEnding Story, The Black Stallion, you name it.
The whole movie feels like something you would've stumbled across on VHS in the '80s at a mom-and-pop video store, probably released by Cannon Films — you know, the studio famous for cranking out rip-offs of bigger Hollywood hits.
That's not entirely a bad thing, necessarily. I mean, those Cannon knockoffs could be a lot of fun. And Ochi has moments that work: some good action sequences, genuinely impressive creature work, and a few beautiful visual passages. But the emotional connection? Totally missing. I didn't care about Yuri's struggle to reunite with her family. I didn't care about Maxim's internal conflict.
Even when the film builds to its big emotional finale — you know, the inevitable family reunion, the "we must come together to save the creatures and ourselves" climax — it just didn't land for me. It was all admiration for the technique but zero real involvement.
And that's a huge problem. You can have the best puppets, the most beautiful forests, and the most sweeping music in the world — but it all feels hollow if you don't care about the characters.
It doesn't help that while Saxon is clearly a talented visual stylist (again, music video background), the script is clunky and way too obvious. The whole metaphor about Maxim favoring his "sons" over his real daughter and punishing his wife for giving birth to a girl is all spelled out with zero nuance.
And once Yuri starts understanding the Ochi's squeaky language (instead of the much easier — and lazier — route of making the Ochi speak English), the film tries for magic and wonder... but again, it's all borrowed wonder, not earned wonder.
A warning, too: despite the PG rating and the cute creature designs, The Legend of Ochi is dark. And I mean dark. There's violence and some upsetting imagery, and thematically, it leans way heavier than your average "family" movie.
This has A24's DNA all over it—weird, twisted, thematically heavy stuff—and it probably should've been rated PG-13. If you're thinking about taking little kids because it has a fuzzy creature on the poster, be very careful. They might not be ready for this one.
Bottom line: The Legend of Ochi is a gorgeously crafted, technically impressive fantasy adventure that desperately wants to evoke the magic of '80s creature features, but it never quite connects.
It's not bad. It's not great. It's one of those movies you admire while watching but forget the second you walk out of the theater. Solid craftsmanship, strong performances (especially from Helena Zengel and Willem Dafoe), and some terrific practical effects — but not enough heart underneath the surface to make it truly memorable. - ⭐️⭐️
On Swift Horses is a movie that really wants to be one of those old-fashioned Hollywood epics about secret romances and tortured hearts — the kind they just don't make anymore — but it falls short pretty much across the board. It deals with provocative and important issues like addiction, hidden sexuality in a repressive era, and the deep loneliness of people living in a world that refuses to accept who they are.
The setup has a lot of promise: the film takes place in the 1950s, in the shadow of the Korean War, when it was basically impossible to openly live as a gay man or a lesbian without fear.
Visually, it leans hard into that classic '50s melodrama look. Cinematography-wise, it absolutely mimics Douglas Sirk's rich, saturated color palette—and for the record, Sirk was one of the all-time masters at making bold, sweeping emotional dramas that felt operatic without ever losing real, human feeling. His films remain timeless for a reason.
But while a guy like Todd Haynes can channel Sirk's spirit and give it real depth (like he did with Far from Heaven), Daniel Minahan — who has done very solid TV work, including the Deadwood movie — is just imitating here. This feels like a copy of a copy. There's no soul underneath the beautiful gloss.
And a big part of the problem is the cast. Daisy Edgar-Jones, who impressed me a lot in Normal People, is just totally out of her depth here. She can't find the emotional weight that a role like this needs. It's the kind of part Julianne Moore could nail in her sleep — but Edgar-Jones struggles to bring any real complexity to Muriel.
Meanwhile, Jacob Elordi — a guy whose fame I frankly don't understand — is purely surface. He's got the striking looks, sure, but zero depth. He was fine as Elvis in Priscilla, but that was thanks to Sofia Coppola and the structure of that film, not because he brought much to the role. In this movie, he's totally exposed.
Will Poulter, an actor I actually really like, is wasted here. His character — the husband, the anchor neither Muriel nor Julius wants to be chained to — isn't written as a human being. He's a symbol and not a particularly interesting one. Sasha Calle is okay as Sandra, the woman who stirs something new in Muriel, but like a lot of this movie, she feels underwritten.
The only real standout performance is from Diego Calva, who plays Henry, Julius' secret lover. Calva, who was so magnetic in Babylon, brings the only real spark of life to this movie. He's charismatic, plays secrets and emotions really beautifully, and every time he's on screen, the movie gets a little better. If there's one reason to maybe check this movie out someday, it's to see what Diego Calva can do with very little.
But overall, On Swift Horses is a mixed bag at best — and that's being generous. It tries to be a grand, sweeping Hollywood romance while also telling an important queer story... and it botches both.
It falls back on clichés, sentimentality, and empty symbolism. It's so busy imitating better filmmakers — Haynes, Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers, Queer), even Ang Lee — that it never becomes anything on its own. It reminded me constantly of other, better movies.
Even structurally, it leans into all the usual beats without finding anything fresh to say. The trip to Mexico, the love triangles, the longing glances — it's all right out of the Luca Guadagnino playbook, but without the tension, the complexity, or the heart. It's like watching someone imitate Challengers and Call Me By Your Name after reading the Wikipedia plot summaries.
And look, I'm always going to say we need more queer stories on screen — especially ones that reflect different eras, different struggles. Telling queer stories set in the '50s is still important. But the execution matters.
You can't just go through the motions, throw some lush cinematography on it, and expect it to resonate. On Swift Horses doesn't earn any of its emotions. I spent the entire time thinking about better movies, directors, and performances.
It's colorful. It's well-shot. But it's hollow. I cannot recommend On Swift Horses at all. - ⭐️⭐️
Cheech & Chong's Last Movie is an absolute love letter to Cheech & Chong fans, and let me tell you right up front: I'm a huge Cheech & Chong fan. I grew up listening to their records alongside Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and Bill Cosby, back when comedy albums were a huge part of my life.
And then, once Up in Smoke hit theaters in 1978—right around the time I was falling head over heels for movies—it was perfect timing. I was a teenager. Cheech and Chong were at their cinematic peak, and those movies became events. I loved them, my friends loved them, and even though I wasn't a pothead and didn't do drugs, I thought they were hilarious. Their sensibility helped shape mine.
So walking into Cheech & Chong's Last Movie, directed by David L. Bushell, felt like slipping into a perfectly broken-in pair of sneakers from high school — comfortable, familiar, and filled with memories. This documentary is structured ingeniously: Cheech and Chong are driving through the desert in a car (of course they are — it's Cheech and Chong!), talking about their lives, their careers, their massive success, their fights, their regrets, their joys.
It's framed like a road movie, but it's a journey through their history. And it's a beautiful trip.
The stuff we get to see in this film? Unbelievable. Home movies, early stage performances, candid interviews, backstage shenanigans, photos, and videos that have never been seen before. As a lifelong fan, every few minutes, something popped up that made me grin from ear to ear.
I had never known about their early lives—Tommy Chong growing up in Canada, getting into jazz, and opening an improv stripper club (!); Cheech Marin growing up in South Central L.A., fleeing an abusive father, becoming a potter, and dodging the Vietnam draft by heading to Canada. These guys found each other through sheer cosmic collision, and the movie lays that out with love and detail.
We see how they started in an improv group (City Works), how the duo of Cheech & Chong was born after everyone else quit, and how they blended music, improv, and street humor into something brand new. Lou Adler, the legendary record producer, discovered them at the Troubadour and helped launch them into superstardom. And then came the albums, the tours, and the movies.
Up in Smoke became an instant cult classic, but its success also brought resentment. The movie gets real about how tensions grew between the two of them, especially once Tommy started directing the movies and Cheech felt sidelined. There are real moments in the car where you see old arguments bubble up and unresolved tensions flare. It's messy, honest, and emotional.
The choice to structure the documentary like a literal road trip, complete with guests hopping into the backseat (like Lou Adler and others), is brilliant. It feels organic, casual, and funny — just like their best comedy. And the fact that they're in their 80s now, still cracking each other up, still poking at old wounds, still driving through the desert looking for "Dave's place" — it's beautiful.
The archival footage is pure gold. We get Playboy interviews, TV appearances (a little too much Geraldo Rivera if you ask me, but still fun), and incredible clips from their concerts that truly capture how electric and revolutionary they were.
Before Steve Martin sold out arenas, Cheech and Chong were rock stars in the comedy world. Bruce Springsteen opened for them. They were the first true rock 'n roll comedians, something this movie smartly highlights.
And the stories! Jack Nicholson driving like a maniac and inspiring "Basketball Jones," George Harrison and Carole King showing up randomly to jam with them, the way their records came together — this is the stuff fans dream about hearing.
There's a real sense of time and place of the '70s counterculture, the birth of alternative comedy, and how these two scrappy guys rode that wave to iconic status.
There's also sadness here—the missed opportunities, the broken partnerships, the frustrations of bad business deals—but the movie never feels bitter. It's celebratory. It's about survival, love, and the messy, complicated bond that keeps them tied together forever.
And stick around through the credits because there's a fantastic postscript that covers later years: Tommy Chong going to jail for selling bongs, later interviews, and bits of footage that further cement just how massive, weird, and influential their legacy is.
Bottom line: Cheech & Chong's Last Movie is a must-see for fans. It's one of the best documentaries of the year. If you grew up with them, you'll laugh, get emotional, and remember just how much these two guys shaped an era. And if you didn't grow up with them? It's still a fascinating, lovingly made portrait of two legends who carved out their own lane in comedy history.
An absolute blast. I loved every minute of it. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Let me start by saying this: whenever a movie opens with the logo of a video game company right after the studio card, you're already in trouble. That's a red flag the size of a haunted house. And Until Dawn proudly slaps that PlayStation Studios logo right up front, essentially announcing, "Hey! We're based on a video game... and we're probably going to suck!"
Spoiler alert: it does.
Now, I've talked and written before about the long and troubled history of video game adaptations. Most are unwatchable disasters, some are oddly charming messes, and very few are good.
Until Dawn doesn't come anywhere near that last category. It's another entry in the "wow, that was really dumb" column. And what's worse — it's not just dumb. It's lazy, uninspired, and completely derivative in the worst way.
Until Dawn takes the Groundhog Day gimmick, mixes it with every horror subgenre under the sun, throws in a group of one-dimensional twentysomethings, and shakes it all together like a stale box of Count Chocula.
The story centers on Clover (played by Ella Rubin), who takes her band of generically attractive, utterly forgettable friends to the spooky valley where, one year earlier, her sister Melanie went missing.
What do they find? A mysterious house, because of course they do. Creepy fog. Mysterious hourglasses. Killer clowns. Witches. Vampires. Zombies. Slashers. Demons. A Wendigo. I'm shocked they didn't squeeze in a cursed Furby or Slender Man for good measure.
Anyway, our disposable heroes get picked off in gruesome fashion, only to wake up again and repeat the cycle. Aha! A time loop! But here's the twist: each time they restart, the killer is different. That's it. That's the big "hook."
Now, done well, a horror time-loop movie can work. Happy Death Day and its sequel are two good examples. But those movies had characters, charm, pacing, and clever writing. Until Dawn has none of that. It's like a bootleg haunted house attraction that forgot to turn the lights on.
The clichés here are relentless. There's the spooky guy at the gas station warning them not to go into the woods. You've seen that character a hundred times — in Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Cabin Fever, you name it.
And here, he's played by Peter Stormare, who seems to be trying out for the role of "most obvious secret villain" with every line of dialogue. And sure enough, who shows up again later? Yep. You saw that coming from the parking lot.
The script is a pastiche of horror templates but without the love or care that makes homage feel earned. There's no tension, no character development, no internal logic. It's like the filmmakers grabbed a bunch of horror buzzwords, stuffed them in a hat, and pulled out whatever sounded most marketable.
And hey — I don't need every horror movie to reinvent the genre. Give me a slasher with a pulse, some atmosphere, and interesting characters, and I'm on board. But Until Dawn has the soul of a loading screen.
David F. Sandberg — responsible for Lights Out, the weakest Annabelle entry, and two aggressively annoying Shazam! movies — continues his streak of visually competent, thematically vacant work. There's no personality here, no spark, no point. Just a bunch of loud noises and jump scares accompanied by video-game-level plotting and pacing.
The time-loop gimmick isn't used in any interesting way. It just gives the movie an excuse to kill characters repeatedly with different monsters, which — granted — results in a few creative kills and some decent makeup and gore effects. One sequence involving poisoned water makes everyone violently explode, which is delightfully disgusting. But that's about it.
Now, I have to mention how I saw this film because it has one of the dumbest but most fascinating promotional gimmicks I've ever encountered.
Until Dawn was screened as part of a nationwide overnight event: six back-to-back showings of the film from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. If you could stay awake, keep your phone off, and not fall asleep — you could win $5,000.
Let me tell you something: $5,000 is not enough.
I sat in on the 9 p.m. screening—the second one of the night—and people were already looking like they regretted their life choices. Sitting through this movie once felt like a punishment. Watching it six times? That's not a contest—that's psychological warfare. They should've offered at least $50,000—or a lifetime supply of therapy.
The sad part is that the core idea — a looping horror movie that cycles through subgenres — could've been so much fun in the hands of someone who actually loves horror. You can tell when a horror filmmaker grew up watching the greats when they bring their own voice to something familiar.
But here, everything is hollow. There's no sense of fun, no scares, no emotional stakes—just dead teenagers, reset button, repeat.
And the cast? They're fine, I guess. But their characters are so thin and archetypal that you could replace them with NPCs from the game, and no one would notice. And I don't mean that as a compliment to the game. I mean that as a slam on the movie.
Until Dawn is a tedious, recycled, unimaginative slog of a horror movie that fails to do anything interesting with its premise or its genre. It's not scary, not smart, or funny — it's just there. A 90-minute reminder of how bad video game adaptations usually are and how saturated the horror market is with lazy trend-chasers.
And if you're considering attending one of those all-night marathons to win five grand? Just know this: I saw the movie once and wouldn't watch it again for ten. - ⭐️
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