"Five Nights at Freddy's" review — No scares to be found in this batch of old animatronics
“Just keep your eyes on the monitors and keep people out. Piece of cake.”
The image of Freddy Fazbear, the title character and one of the chief antagonists of the Five Nights at Freddy’s video game series, has become an icon in internet pop culture over the last nine years since the original game was released. Created, developed, and published independently by Scott Cawthorn, the original Freddy’s game was the “little indie game that could” back in the yesteryear of 2014. It’s a point-and-click horror survival game where you play as the overnight security guard of a run-down pizzeria trying to protect yourself from the four homicidal animatronics that roam the halls at night. The games grew popular thanks to their dead simple mechanics, distinctive monster design, popularity on YouTube, and intriguing narrative seeds hidden throughout the game. Growing from its DIY roots, the franchise has spawned nine video games in the main series, several spin-offs, a series of novels, fiction anthologies, and now a feature film adaptation from Blumhouse, one of the leading horror studios around. But the results of trying to turn this game into a film have rendered a product that is uninspired in its storytelling, totally unappealing in its craft, and completely devoid of actual horror. Being stuffed into a springlock suit sounds more appealing than the thought of enduring a second round of Five Nights at Freddy’s.
The Five Nights at Freddy’s movie has been a long time coming, with the film bouncing around between creative teams and studios since the film rights were first sold in 2015. It shuffled through a plethora of writers and directors, including Pride and Prejudice and Zombies author Seth Grahame-Smith and Home Alone/Mrs. Doubtfire/Harry Potter director Chris Columbus, before finally settling on its final creative team in 2021. Now the film arrives in theatres and on streaming in a complete, if entirely uninspired, form, directed by Emma Tammi (best known for her independent horror film The Wind (2018)) with a script co-written by Tammi, Seth Cuddeback, and original series creator Scott Cawthorn. The film is a total mess. It’s so grossly average in its plotting with more aborted character arcs than there are video games in the franchise. Its main plot only serves as a diversion from the more interesting story threads, which are underdeveloped and wasted. The editing is hyper-acting and amateur. Tammi’s direction is completely lifeless and indistinct. Five Nights at Freddy’s won’t scare you — it’ll just bore you.
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| Josh Hutcherson in Five Nights at Freddy’s. Photo via Universal. |
Our protagonist is Mike Schmidt (played by Josh Hutcherson), a down-on-his-luck security guard who’s also serving as the legal guardian of his sister, Abby (played by newcomer Piper Rubio). After the death of their parents, Mike has been trying to keep Abby in his custody and away from Aunt Jane (played by Mary Stuart Masterson), who Matt claims only wants to have custody of Abby for the subsidy cheques the government would provide. After an altercation at a shopping mall where he was previously working gets him fired, Mike has one last shot at a stable job which might make the ongoing legal case more sympathetic towards him: he’s got to take the graveyard shift at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a now-defunct family entertainment centre that went out of business in the 1980s. Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, the home of the film’s primary action, is like a Chuck E. Cheese if the paint was peeling off the walls, the design was stuck in the 1980s, and the robots on stage wanted to kill you. As Mike’s work starts, he starts to notice strange things about the place. He eventually meets police officer Vanessa Shelly (played by Elizabeth Lail) who informs him about the string of murders that happened at Freddy’s during its heyday, all executed by the founder, William Afton.
It’d be hard to care less about Mike and his family woes, as they only serve as a distraction to the more interesting story threads that are hinted at in the film. The film attempts to set up an interesting connection between Mike and the murders, but this storytelling nugget is never used to create meaningful stakes for the character, force him to do anything particularly remarkable, nor does it make much sense within the timeline of the film. Josh Hutcherson’s performance certainly doesn’t help, as he seems to put no effort into the character. And then there’s Vanessa, who makes Mike look as complicated as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Vanessa is given a morsel of significant characterization in the film’s third act, but until that point, serves as an exposition-dumping machine. Elizabeth Lail is more lifeless and Hutcherson with some of the most awkward line readings I’ve seen in a movie this year.
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| Piper Rubio in Five Nights at Freddy’s. Photo via Universal. |
Where the video game series is known for its cryptic, drip-fed narrative details given through phone calls, old tape recordings, newspaper fragments, and low-bit minigames, the film resorts to in-your-face exposition and woefully standard narrative construction. Hardly anything is a mystery in Five Nights at Freddy’s as characters like Vanessa are more than happy to dump exposition on Mike whenever he needs it. When the film comes to its dramatic, all-is-revealed third act, the reveals can’t help but feel anticlimactic as the film never builds enough tension around the reveal of the villain pulling the strings or any of the secrets that Freddy’s holds. While it’s hard to talk specifics without spoiling the reveals, the film’s already flimsy internal logic frays even more as it turns into an un-deserved, un-rewarding mess of a finale.
From a craft perspective, there’s nothing remarkable about this film. Abrupt, ugly editing abounds between shots and within the larger narrative. The editing is hyperactive, and yet the film has way too much unnecessary fat still stuck on it. The cinematography is ugly and unappealing. The colour grading is flat, the camera lacks energy, and the shot composition is brain-dead. Despite being practical models, the film’s deadly animatronics look artificial and digital thanks to the sloppy camera work. The film struggles, further, to establish a tone. It maintains an American PG-13 rating in order not to alienate the younger demographic that the games appeal to, but there is a severe disconnect between the narrative elements (again, child murder) and its unwillingness to actually embrace the violent nature of the animatronic torture devices. The film feels afraid of its darker inclinations, which means that the film can’t actually create any meaningful sense of fear. There’s no tension, the body horror elements are pushed to the back burner, and the horror is non-existent.
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| The four animatronic antagonists of Five Nights at Freddy’s. Left to right: Foxy, Chica, Freddy, and Bonnie. Photo via Universal. |
The greatest fault of the film is that there’s no clear creative voice guiding the project, which results in this deeply unoriginal pastiche of better horror films. There’s not the slightest attempt at any form of originality or surprise here. The script is full of lazy cliches and poor characterization, lazy structuring, and painfully awkward characterization. Director Emmi Tammi can’t cast a vision, instead settles for making a “generic horror movie” with her filmmaking. She can’t pull interesting performances out of her actors, can’t find a unique way to capture the action, nor does she work around the limitations of the rating in any significant way.
In the original game, as the nights go on, there is an increasing sense of dread in the player as the animatronics become more violent and the secrets of the restaurant are slowly revealed. But in this movie, the “five nights” Mike has to endure just feels like torture for the audience because you’ll be so desperate for the sweet release of the credits. Five Nights at Freddy’s is a frustrating experience because it contains so many tantalizing narrative ideas and design elements, but just can’t figure out a compelling way to execute its story. At the end of the day, while it’s fun to rail into a bad movie every once and a while, I don’t think it’s entirely fair of me to be this mean to Five Nights at Freddy’s. Why should I put this much effort into a review when it’s clear no one put effort into the movie itself?
Five Nights at Freddy’s is now playing in theatres and streaming on Peacock (United States).
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