Aside from one non-canon take on an RPG, Scott Cawthon’s Five Nights at Freddy’s series has been milking the same creepy, winning formula for nine years. In the games, players inhabit a night-shift security guard charged with keeping an eye on a gang of sentient, decaying animatronic animals, who’ve claimed residence at a derelict Chuck E. Cheese-like establishment called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. Fail at closing doors and checking cameras, among other tasks, and one of these big fuzzy lummoxes does horrible things to your face.
Emma Tammi’s Five Nights at Freddy’s takes that formula and doesn’t exactly run with it. There’s a brief assault against a gang trying to break into the pizzeria that ends in one of the film’s two memorable moments of violence. The other? A climactic moment that’s basically the finale of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser but with pizza mascots. And for maybe three minutes in the third act, the animatronic beasts feel legitimately terrifying. But for the rest of its running time, Five Nights at Freddy’s has absolutely no idea what kind of ride it wants to be.
Occasionally, the film is a family dramedy about an insomniac named Mike (Josh Hutcherson) who takes a series of odd security jobs to keep his innocent sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), out of the custody of his cartoonishly evil aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson, having the most fun of anyone in the film). Sometimes, though, it plays as a supernatural murder mystery where Mike has to enter his national park-themed mind palace to piece together who kidnapped his little brother when he was a kid, and five random ghost children show up who might have the answers.
And every so often, the film is also a sub-Spielbergian charmer about a little girl who finds out the animatronic robots at her brother’s new security guard job are possessed by little children, and has to try and convince the grown-ups that her new giant friends are nice. In the end, the only common thread between all three of those plots is that none of them work.
With that in mind, it’s not exactly a surprise that putting all of those disparate pieces together in a film that’s not even two hours long results in a convoluted and atonal mess. It never comes alive enough to be interesting, weird, or interestingly weird, which is one of the factors that made the original game stand out against a tide of increasingly action-focused survival horror titles of the time. The most basic ask of this Five Nights at Freddy’s—establish that the animatronics are alive and frightening—is telegraphed with a profound lack of tension.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
