Sony Pictures’ loose adaptation of Until Dawn reimagines a beloved horror video game with a brand new story with several terrifying mysteries. Directed by David F. Sandberg (Shazam!), 2025’s Until Dawn revolves around Clover, who searches for her missing sister, Melanie, and ends up in a remote house where time is reset at sunrise and a variety of monsters try to kill her and her friends each night.
Until Dawn raises several questions throughout its bloody and time-bending story. Even when the credits roll, the movie leaves its audience aching for more answers. The way the story leaves some things up for interpretation, particularly the evil force manipulating the events of the film, elevates the terror by invoking viewers’ fear of the unknown. However, it is clear from the movie’s ending that there is still so much that the filmmakers are dying to share with the audience.
What’s the story?
2025’s Until Dawn begins with Melanie’s death at the hands of a mysterious Masked Man. Cut to a year later, Clover is seen retracing her sister Melanie’s steps to figure out the truth behind her disappearance. Traveling with Max, Nina, Megan, and Abe, Clover investigates a convenience store where Melanie was last spotted. There, she meets Hill, who directs her to Glore Valley, where many people have mysteriously vanished. After driving through a heavy rainstorm, Clover and her group ended up at the visitor’s center for Glore Valley. Later that night, they are all murdered by the Masked Man, only to wake up alive and where they were when the night began.
Clover and her friends are trapped in a time loop centered around the house. As they try to survive the night and escape the house, they are killed by supernatural forces, including a possessed elderly woman, tap water that causes anyone who drinks it to explode, and humanoid, flesh-eating monsters known as Wendigos.
Eventually, the group learns that a mining collapse caused nearly the entire town in Glore Valley to sink into the Earth decades ago. The people who survived the collapse were treated at a psychiatric hospital and transformed into the Wendigos under the watchful eye of Dr. Alan Hill, the man from the convenience store. To this day, Hill continues to experiment on people by having them die again and again for 13 days until the fear, despair, and hopelessness they’ve experienced turn them into Wendigos. This is revealed to have been Melanie’s fate, with the Wendigo that used to be her appearing to attack Clover.
How does it end?
After Megan survives one of the nights and follows Hill, Clover and the others venture into the tunnels beneath the house to find her. Beneath the Earth, they kill the Masked Man and the monstrous Melanie. Clover then finds Hill in his office, where she secretly spikes his drink with the explosive tap water while rambling about his plans. Before he dies, Hill reveals that the monsters that appeared in the film are manifestations of Clover’s deepest fears that were brought to life by the house’s evil.
With Hill dead, Clover rescues Megan from a Wendigo that Hill had imprisoned her with for testing. Her friends escape from the Wendigos and climb out of the tunnels, just in time for the sunrise. Having finally escaped the time loop, Clover and her friends return to their car and drive away. While this seems like a happy ending for them, the film cuts to the security cameras in Hill’s office, which inexplicably show footage of a lodge in a snowy, unknown region. While this may confuse newcomers to the Until Dawn franchise, fans of the video games will know this is a reference to the Washington Lodge, the mountain home where the events of the source material take place.
What does it all mean?
While the main plot of Until Dawn follows the cast trying to escape the time loop, the film is also about Clover overcoming her depression, which the characters address multiple times. The Wendigos embody what she and Melanie feared they would become if they stayed where they were in life, which is why the latter left home. Since Clover attempted suicide twice in the past, she is forced to confront this issue with her mental health as she relives death again and again. Though Melanie isn’t so fortunate in life, Clover comes to terms with her loss and refuses to succumb to her fear and sorrow. She thus dared to venture into the unknown darkness to rescue Megan, allowing her to break the cycle of pain and despair by making it until dawn with her friends.
As for the time loop, there’s no explanation as to why Glore Valley keeps reliving the same day repeatedly. Since the cycle of death and rebirth is what turns people into Wendigos, the dark force that created these monsters may be responsible for the time loop. It is also likely that this evil was first awakened with the collapse of the Glore Valley mines. How it’s connected to the snowy lodge on Hill’s security camera remains unknown. Perhaps it is another test site where he watches people die and turn into monsters, which seems to pave the way for a possible sequel that falls more in line with the video game’s story.
Until Dawn is now in theaters.
