The film is based on the video game of the same name developed by Supermassive Games in 2015 and which has become over the years a classic of interactive horror.
The proposal was not far from the typical movie about teenagers who go to a cabin and things happen, but where it shone was in its narrative approach, allowing the player to make decisions and choose who died and who lived through their actions, which varied the route or end of each one.
In its own way, so to speak, if its story was nothing special, it shone in how it turned you into the people in the engine room of “Cabin in the Woods”, into the God who could end or extend the lives of his guinea pigs.
You could have adapted the same plot but the fun would be nil, because the story is pocha and the fun was how they subverted it with interaction. Instead, and I think it's a wise move, Sandberg decides to take specific elements (house in the woods, Stormare's character, etc) to narrate something different and decides that the ‘game’ is each loop the protagonists face, different nights, with variations that will make each wait until dawn have something new to bring.
Deaths we have a few, varied, bloody and violent. In the darkness lurks everything: psychopathic killers, witches, monsters... There is also variety in that aspect. It is a carnival of panic.
The atmosphere is thrilling and the rhythm does not stop. Unfortunately the protagonists are the typical stereotypical twenty-somethings who are good for nothing but dying.
A mysterious but underused Peter Stormare (who was already in the video game) pops up from time to time.
Without going into the resolution of the film, I think there was a lot more to it. There are flashes here and there of what could have been, it has -I insist- some cool sequences and it can't be said to be boring, in fact it's quite entertaining, but the particularity of its premise (the time loop) is barely explored in conditions and its catalog of terrors seems to come out of the discards of "Nightmares" by R.L. Stine.
The movie probably polarizes the viewer and pits those who have played the game and feel insulted against those who haven't and feel it's a mediocre slasher.
