‘Until Dawn’ has one of the best premises of a feature film in the last year, but its execution fails to live up to expectations. There is a ‘Groundhog Day’ dimension to this story of a group of young people who find themselves in a single location home in the middle of the woods, and whatever they do to try and extricate themselves from their nightmare they cannot keep death at bay – only to wake up again and have to continually repeat their experience.

The house has a calendar that shows 1998 and there is a guest book, too, which has the same names in it from that period, the suggestion being that, like ‘The Shining’, there is a psychic trauma or possession located in a physical space and which will haunt and consume those who inhabit its walls, destined never to escape with their lives. The options are to survive the night or to die ad infinitum. But, there is no creativity on offer in the way each death – at the hands of an evil clown – is administered, and we are privy instead to riffs on the same premise, which after a short while become repetitive and indistinguishable from what has come before.

For such an inventive premise to have such a plodding and by the numbers delivery feels like a wasted opportunity. The young cast are merely cyphers (even down to having one of them playing the part of a psychic whose powers are belittled, until it transpires that she has arrived at this home with a unique set of skills which turn out to be rather useful), and we know or care so little about them that when there is a revelation about the past of one or two of them it doesn’t feel consequential as their absence of a backstory means that we lack any investment in the traumas being conjured up.

The only variation offered is the type of death to which the twentysomething characters are privy, and even this falls short of the more existentially-laden manner of ‘Groundhog Day’ which also riffs on the premise of someone discovering that no matter how many varieties of death they undergo the outcome is the same. In that film, however, there were layers of sardonic humour to the nightmare, whereby a TV weatherman experiences the same day over and over again, and there was also at least a sense of satisfaction to watching him find something to learn from each experience.

There was, in other words, a character arc and a sense of becoming a better person through each ordeal. This is all in scant supply in ‘Until Dawn’ which instead gives us the visual imagery of stabbings, shootings, beatings or even exploding heads but lacks the necessary interrogation of them to work beyond merely visual registers. It is thus sad to see a great premise squandered and for such a perfunctory rendering of what should be an urgent, life and death battle. We have no investment in anybody’s death, which makes the film’s purpose seem so underwhelming and wasteful.