Until Dawn, the 2025 survival horror film directed by David F. Sandberg, spins a chilling standalone tale inspired by the 2015 PlayStation video game of the same name. With a group of friends trapped in a remote location haunted by a sinister time loop, the movie takes its audience through a terrifying cycle of death, dread, and desperate survival. Built on a foundation of clever ideas and a unique take on the slasher genre, the slasher movie boldly attempts to deliver multiple horror experiences within one storyline. While it stumbles at times under the weight of its ambitious concept, the movie barely manages to create any intrigue with its narrative, eerie atmosphere, and meta-horror nods.
In this article I take a deeper dive into the ending of the movie Until Dawn. Please be aware, the article contain spoilers.
Until Dawn (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
What happens at the visiting centre in Galore Valley?
The movie begins by introducing Clover (Ella Rubin) along with her friends: the ex-boyfriend Max (Michael Cimino), Nina (Odessa A’zion) and her boyfriend Abe (Belmont Cameli), and Megan (Ji-young Yoo), on their way to the place where Clover’s sister, Melanie (Maia Mitchell), went missing. After driving for long hours, the group decides to take a break at a gas station where Clover meets the station owner, Hill (Peter Stormare).
Curious to find as many clues as possible to retrace her sister’s footsteps, Clover inquires Hill about Melanie. Hill shares that people often go missing around a mining town named Galore Valley. This leads the group in that direction, however, heavy rainfall forces them to halt at the visitor centre. Weirdly, as they enter the centre’s driveway, they notice the rain has stopped—but when they look back, it’s still raining in the surrounding area.
After much contemplation, one by one, the group enters the centre house and realizes there is no one around, and everything inside remains suspended in time. Nina notices a guest check-in book with the names of guests, including Melanie’s name written multiple times, making her curious about the place. Abe also finds a room where a wall is adorned with missing persons’ posters—one of them featuring Melanie’s picture. While everyone tries to wrap their heads around Melanie’s whereabouts, Nina notices the hourglass that had been still all this while has now been turned around.
Consequently, Abe’s car, which he had parked right outside the house, is now on the other side—where the rain begins pouring. It seems someone is on the car outside and is challenging the group inside the house. With no phone or network signal, the group is paralyzed, unable to find a way out of this strange place. This is when things get really messy—when the group finds a house underneath the centre and a masked man just starts killing the people one at a time.
Who is Dr. Hill and how is he related to the visiting centre in Galore Valley?
As the night begins again, Clover and her friends feel disoriented, as if they woke up from a surreal dream where they saw their friends die right in front of their eyes. Strangely, everyone is awake—the night seems like it has only just begun as the hourglass rewinds the horrifying experience again. With their pictures now on the missing persons wall and Nina’s name in the guest book, as everyone starts to gain their composure and understand how they are still alive, Megan gets possessed by a ghostly spirit, pointing fingers at all the pictures of the missing people, voicing, “not to let it get inside.”
Unfortunately, Megan gets killed again, and Clover gets dragged outside to an old house across the street by a mischievous spirit. As she comes back to her senses and looks around, the house is filled with weird masks and an old lady watching the news about a mining hazard that engulfed the entire town inside. At this point, the group of friends gets killed again individually, in various different ways. However, Clover (before she dies again) realises that the man from the gas station has something to do with the bizarre place.
As the night begins again and everyone assembles to get out of this horrifying cycle, they gather everything they can find in the centre. While jiggling through files and documents, Clover finds a ‘Blackwood Sanatorium’ ID card with the man from the gas station’s picture on it, labelled Dr. Alan J. Hill—a psychiatrist. It turns out the town was located on hazardous land—a mining field—and the engineers had bored too deep into the earth, resulting in over 1,000 people dying. Dr. Hill, who specialised in trauma healing, was brought in by the state to work with the remaining survivors.
As the group continues digging, they come to realise that their deaths are only going to intensify and they’ll be stuck here forever unless they try some way out. This is when Max finds a VHS tape with a man helplessly crying, unable to understand why he keeps coming back alive. Dr. Hill’s voice in the recording points out that he is making an observatory evaluation—an experiment on the survivors’ mental and emotional state.
Until Dawn (2025) Movie Ending Explained:
This makes everyone even more confused, scared, and unable to think things through as the group tries to find Dr. Hill in the following nights. As indicated in the guest entries earlier, every visitor succumbed to the menacing experience on the 13th night. Meanwhile, we go back into a flashback where Clover and Melanie had a spat when Melanie wanted to start her life afresh after their mother’s death. That was also the last time Clover ever saw her sister before her mysterious disappearance, and to this day, she has been carrying guilt about that day.
Does Clover finds her sister?
As Clover awakens on the 13th night, she hurries to retrace Dr. Hill’s whereabouts and ends up in a tunnel. While Megan seems to be missing, the rest of the group tries to follow Clover’s trail too. Unfortunately, the masked man comes back, intent on killing everyone. With the group fighting for their lives against the masked man and a Wendigo – an evil monster, Clover splits from the group to find Dr. Hill—and this is when she meets a very disoriented, almost zombie-like Melanie. Clover believes her sister is still alive; however, when Melanie attacks her, Clover is forced to kill her.
Do Clover and her friends manage to break free from the deathly cycle in Galore Valley?
After coming back to her senses, Clover finds herself in a sanatorium where Megan is trapped in a glass room with a wendigo. Clover finally confronts Hill and learns that he has been running experiments on the visitors, and that this mysterious creature is the result of Clover’s fears and sadness—just like what she and her friends saw in that VHS tape earlier.
As Dr. Hill continues to blabber about his experiments, he puts his coffee mug on his work table, and Clover uses the opportunity to move the mug under a leaking tap with deadly water. When Dr. Hill drinks his coffee, he explodes in the same way the group died earlier. Clover quickly grabs the keys and manages to rescue Megan from the room, and the rest of the group escapes the masked man after killing him. As they make their way out of the tunnel, the wendigos follow them—and just then, the hourglass runs out, breaking the dawn with the first sunlight.
What does the last scene of the movie indicate?
The group finally gets free from the time loop, and with that they drive away from the centre. As we see the group leaving, the scene shifts to Dr. Hill’s office with someone humming ominously in the background. We also see six screen camera footage from Galore Valley to a snowy visiting centre. In the footage, we see a car pulling up—and the credits start to roll.
