The Choice is Not Yours: Mental Illness in Until Dawn

Few works open by directly speaking to their themes, and fewer still can pull it off as deftly as Peter Stormare's Dr. Hill in Supermassive Games' teen slasher horror, Until Dawn. Cradling his cup of tea, he gazes directly into the camera to say, "Before we begin, there are a few things I need to make sure you understand... The past is beyond our control. But there is freedom in this revelation. Everything you do, every decision you make from now on, will open doors to the future. I want you to remember this. I want you to remember this as you play your game. Every single choice will affect your fate, and the fate of those around you."

Supermassive Games is playing a game of their own with Dr. Hill. This is a game about choice, they say, as if to speak to the player herself. Your decisions matter. You are in control. It is a conceit reinforced by Dr. Hill's vocabulary, frequently couched in video game terminology: "triggering events", "this game you're playing", "what you do....what you say... causes things to change!"

But the real trick comes as the player learns that Dr. Hill is in fact speaking to a character in the game and is in fact a figment of that character's imagination. And that character, Rami Malek's Josh, a teenage boy whose sisters had disappeared a year before the events of the game, is not well. He had been in and out of mental health hospitals for years, even before the disappearances, had been on various medications, and had been in the long term care of the actual Dr. Hill. And in the light of that revelation, we are forced to consider that Dr. Hill's opening statements are not wrong. This is a game about powerlessness, the fallacy of control, and hopeless terror - not for horror game players, but for victims of trauma and mental illness. Through Josh, we are asked to feel despair over a tragedy we could not prevent, and we are asked to feel that pain within the framework of a mind that is not well, that had begun that cruel work of betraying its own body well before the trauma itself ever occurred.

Josh begins his own game by assuming the persona of a crazed serial killer known as the Psycho. As the Psycho, he constructs elaborate, Saw-like traps for his friends that appear to present them with impossible choices. But for Josh, trapped in his trauma, choice is meaningless, and so the choices his friends make here are equally without consequence.

In one trap, his friend, Noah Fleiss' Chris, is asked to choose whether to save Josh or his love interest, Galadriel Stineman's Ashley, from a murderous saw. But regardless of Chris' choice - a choice the player herself is asked to make - it is Josh who (seemingly) dies at the hands of the saw. Later, Chris is again asked to choose. He is given a gun with which he is told to shoot himself or Ashley to prevent the death of them both. But the gun is filled with blanks. No matter Chris' (and the player's) choice, no one dies.

And as these games play out, and his friends grow to fear the Psycho, Josh's internalized sessions with Dr. Hill degrade. The psychologist's office darkens, fills with detritus, the window opening to reveal otherworldly scenes outside. The doctor himself grows more and more inhinged, until finally the Psycho emerges within the office to seemingly attack Dr. Hill.

But when the events climax, and Josh reveals himself to be the Psycho, his friends are furious and isolate him. And here we find Dr. Hill's office entirely returned to normal. The psychologist sits comfortably in his chair, taunting Josh. "Can you feel how cold your loneliness has become?"

And here, we note the first time we saw Dr. Hill composed - at the beginning of the game, when the kids were all arriving at the lodge and Josh was just beginning to ready himself to put his plot in motion. Then, Josh was scared, nervous, and vulnerable - as he is now.

Dr. Hill is undoubtedly a voice in Josh's own head, and a part of Josh himself. If so, then it appears to be a voice of judgment, telling Josh after his friends abandon him, "I don't know what's worse. Actively triggering events that lead to someone's death or passively allowing a tragedy to occur."

When Josh is anxious and afraid, the Dr. Hill persona is stable, in control, and domineering. When Josh feels in control, Dr. Hill is anxious and afraid. How significant, then, that Josh's Dr. Hill and internalized Psycho are never both entirely in control! It is a war between Josh's selves that can never find balance. And it reflects the turmoil in Josh's own mind.

By couching Dr. Hill's "sessions" in terms of choices and control, Supermassive Games is framing Josh's own fear and trauma in the same way. He failed to prevent the disappearance - and likely death - of his sisters. He had no control. And now he hopes to regain it and assert his will on the universe. "You're only going to see what I want you to see," he tells his friend, Sam, while she wanders through his Psycho-nightmare.

But Josh is never truly in control, and he struggles to ground himself in that reality. His Psycho persona has the arrogance to assert world views, but inside he is a defeated boy who does not truly understand reality. "You only see what you want to see," he protests to his friends, unmasked and despairing.

In the final moments of the game, the player does eventually gain control of Josh - only to immediately lose that control to cut-scenes and hallucinations. As they end, play changes to another character entirely. The game only returns to Josh long enough for the player to walk him down a short, nigh-linear series of hallways, before she loses control again - this time permanently.

For all it has to say about the fallacy of choice in a world where events are largely beyond your influence and control - and here we mean both the video game world itself as well as the actual world - Until Dawn also wants you to feel that despair and powerlessness as a victim of trauma and mental disorder might. It's chaotic, seemingly arbitrary, and terrifying. To face mental illness and pain, then, is to have what little choice the universe does grant you stripped away. You can bargain with your inner psychologist all you like, but as he is keen to remind you, "The past is beyond your control." And so, you sense, is everything else.

Josh was never going to be well after his trauma at the cabin, where his sisters met their tragic ends. And of all the playable characters in the game proper, Josh is the only one who cannot truly survive the events of the game. Those events, it turns out, were set into motion long ago by forces beyond Josh's control. Josh was unwell before his sisters disappeared, and he remained unwell afterwards.

And so we find the true tragedy of Until Dawn: sometimes there is no answer to tragedy and trauma. Sometimes there are just victims, and, whatever masks they choose to wear, they are already doomed.