Until Dawn ending explained: How does Clover escape?

Following in her sister’s footsteps, Clover is joined by long-time best friends Max (Micheal Cimino), Megan (Ji-young Yoo) and Nina (Odessa A’zion), and newcomer Abe (Belmont Cameli).

But when the group enters Glore Valley, they become trapped in a time loop that adds new threats every time they die.

Hunted down by a masked killer, torn apart by Wendigos, exploded by poisoned water, and haunted by the enigmatic Dr Hill, Clover and her friends are tortured night after night.

Worse, they realise their lives are limited, and that if they don’t escape soon, they too will become monstrous creatures.

Can they make it through the night and survive until dawn? Read on to have the Until Dawn ending explained.

Until Dawn ending explained: Do Clover and her friends escape?

Waking up on their 13th and final night, with Megan missing, Clover, Max, Nina and Abe decide to use their last chance to save her.

After they split up while being chased by Wendigos, Clover finds Megan strapped to a chair in a padded cell with a Wendigo chained up across from her.

Unable to unlock the cell, Clover searches for a key and finds Dr Hill’s office. In it, an observation deck is set up, with screens showing all of the rooms in Glore Valley.

Dr Hill confronts Clover, explaining that she is the reason her friends are trapped, and that someone must always die.

While he monologues, Clover pushes his coffee so that the poisoned water drips into it. He drinks from the cup and continues taunting her, repeating that someone must die in order for them to escape. She tells him that this time, he is the one who dies. Dr Hill explodes.

Taking the keys, Clover runs to Megan’s cell and unstraps her just as the Wendigo is about to escape. The five friends reunite and race to climb out of the underground.

Confronted with a wall of dirt, Clover digs through, until her hand emerges from the broken-down grave she saw when they first arrived at the hotel.

As the sun rises, the friends lie on the grass, and Abe gets his car ready for them to leave.

For Clover, Max, Megan, Nina and Abe, though, the night is over. They survived until dawn.

How was Clover able to escape?

When Clover confronts Dr Hill, he reveals that she is the cause of their horrors. While it isn’t all in her head, Dr Hill says that her fears and traumas inform the creatures in the time loop. He implies the masked killer is a common fear, but that the exploding water is a reflection of her self-destructive urges.

In 1998, a mining accident caused the town of Glore Valley to sink, killing almost all of its inhabitants.

Dr Hill came to Glore Valley to experiment on the survivors. He soon realised that their trauma, when added to the never-ending night, slowly transformed them into monsters: Wendigos.

Ever since, he has been trapping visitors in this time loop, watching how their anxieties manifest in the nightmare realm. Clover’s escape isn’t just due to her outsmarting Dr Hill, but also thanks to her finding closure.

Realising the importance of living each day as if its her last, Clover is finally able to move on from the dual grief of her mother’s passing and her sister’s disappearance. Her repeating cycle of self-destruction has come to an end.

Does Dr Hill survive in Until Dawn?

Once the gang escape, we return to Dr Hill’s office. While someone hums ominously just off camera, the six screens switch footage from Glore Valley, to a snowy empty lodge. In the footage, a car pulls up to the mountain house and credits start to roll.

It is implied, through the humming heard at the end, that Dr Hill survived. His screens flicking to a different location indicates that he is moving on to experimenting on a new group.

How does Until Dawn's movie ending connect to the game?

Rather than another random location, the snowy lodge at the end of Until Dawn is actually a reference to where the game takes place: the Washington Lodge on Blackwood Pines mountain.

With a car arriving, it can only mean one thing: the events of the Until Dawn game are about to happen. This implies the Until Dawn movie is a prequel to the game.

Instead of being a cameo, Peter Stormare’s presence as Dr Hill connects the two stories. Through his fascination with disturbed individuals, his cryptic monologues, his insistence on testing fears and traumas, with the added context of the film, it seems he is actually the main antagonist of the game.

This theory is only solidified by one of the movie’s Easter eggs.

When Dr Hill places Clover’s patient notes on his desk, he also lays down the patient notes of a 20-year-old man named Josh Washington, one of the main characters in the video game, who is also terrorised by Dr Hill.

Who is the patient at the end of Until Dawn? Who is Josh Washington?

In the 2015 video game, Josh Washington, portrayed by Rami Malek, is one of the eight friends trapped on the mountain.

Josh’s parents own the lodge they stay at, as well as Blackwood Pines, the mountain where the game takes place.

A year before the events of the game, Josh’s twin sisters, Hannah and Beth Washington, go missing in a snowstorm after Hannah was cruelly pranked.

On the anniversary of their mysterious disappearance, Josh invites everyone back to the lodge to remember them and to "party like we’re f***ing porn stars".

Spoiler alert: The protagonists find out that Josh has been staging a horror movie prank as revenge, including setting up projectors to create ghosts, chasing his friends as the Masked Psycho, and faking his own death.

But when a real supernatural threat, the Wendigo, emerges, Josh’s fragile mental state collapses, and we discover that our interactions with the fourth-wall breaking Dr Hill have actually been Josh’s hallucinations of his own psychiatrist.

Depending on the playthrough, Josh is either killed or kidnapped by Wendigo and left to die in the mines.

If the movie events are to be believed, Josh is not only a grieving disturbed young man, but like Clover, is subject to Dr Hill’s experimentations.

Rather than experiencing a psychotic break, this added twist means that the horror of the game was created to test and torture Josh.

Until Dawn is now showing in UK cinemas.

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