What About Megan? Dissecting A Major Plot Hole In ‘Until Dawn’ (2025)

Whether you’re a fan of the original 2015 PlayStation game of the same name set at a snowy mountain cabin or you just really love a good time loop, the new Until Dawn horror movie just released to theaters has probably already caught your attention. Starring Ella Rubin (Anora), Michael Cimino (Annabelle Comes Home), Odessa A’zion (Hellraiser), Ji-young Yoo (Freaky Tales), Belmont Cameli (The Alto Knights), and Peter Stormare (Fargo), it diverges completely from the plot of the game. Rather than a group of friends mourning the loss that haunted their previous year’s winter retreat, the movie finds main character Clover (Rubin) looking for her missing sister in a lost mining town.

Until Dawn brings in a clever time loop mechanic as the gang enters an abandoned visitor center. Just after signing the guest book, they’re hunted by a grisly killer. After the last of them perishes, the day resets from the moment of the guest book and the five friends need to find a new way to survive the night. Why? Because unlike other time loop movies, they aren’t experiencing the exact same circumstances over and over again. Instead, the haunted town finds new and surprising ways to take them out.

Clover and her friends realize that, as long as they can last until dawn, they can break free from this hellish time loop. Of course, it isn’t that easy. If one of them dies, they reset the day so they can find a way to save them all. They’re told that if a few survives, those can be free while the others are left behind–and they’re not interested in splitting the party. But that’s where a big plot hole comes in for the movie, especially if you take just the movie’s lore into account, and not the game’s. Spoilers ahead.

Shouldn’t Megan have survived the night?

Toward the end of the movie, Clover wakes up in the living room of the visitor’s center only to learn two important things: They are on their 13th and likely last night and Megan (Yoo), the psychic of the friend group, didn’t wake up into the world like the rest of them. At first they assume that maybe she succumbed to the body-changing affects of the time loop, becoming a monster before the rest of them. However, as they watch videos stored on Abe’s (Cameli) phone, they realize that Megan had actually disappeared the night before. Just after everyone else had died, the true villain of the movie, Dr. Hill (Stormare) walks through a door and into the mining tunnels below town. Megan quickly follows him, thus ending Night 12. It’s then, on Night 13, that the rest of the group decide to follow her.

After the rest get split up, Clover gets near the end of her below-ground journey and finds Megan chained up inside a hospital observation room. The implication is that Megan was captured by Dr. Hill after following him and he secured her there to be eaten alive by a wily Wendigo.

Here’s the thing…If Megan was taken by Hill the night before, that means she didn’t die on day 12. If the lore is to be believed, that should mean that she survived the night and should have found her way out of the time loop ahead of the others. So why is she still in the hell that is Glore Valley? It’s a question that’s left completely ignored by the movie.

What this could mean for the real time loop lore.

Clover and the gang have the rules of the time loop, but where did they learn them? They heard them from the villain himself, Dr. Hill. They’ve been laboring under the assumption that he was upfront and truthful with them, and it would certainly seem like he was. After all, they did find their way out of the time loop after surviving the night. But that doesn’t solve the Megan plot hole. Perhaps the real key to leaving wasn’t just surviving the night, but surviving Dr. Hill. They killed the mad doctor right before they escaped. Perhaps if he had lived, they never would have gotten out of the loop regardless of whether there was sand left in the hourglass. For now, these are just suppositions based on the lore of the film. We may never get a complete answer–especially if there’s never a sequel.

Until Dawn is in theaters now.