FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S - Mark Reviews Movies

Five Nights at Freddy's, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 26, 2023

Five Nights at Freddy's is a very silly movie that takes itself far too seriously. It's tough to tell which of its two significant shortcomings is worse. It's not funny, despite a ridiculous and fairly clever gimmick, and it's definitely not scary, despite the fact that its entire existence owes itself to source material that's rather famous for having the ability to startle people in very simple ways.

The basic premise here should be known to anyone with even a passing knowledge of video games over the past decade. The movie is based on the game series created by Scott Cawthon, whose involvement in the adaptation includes producing it and co-writing the screenplay. Cawthon struck digital gold with those games, in which, for the most part, the player acted as the night security guard at a mostly abandoned theme restaurant that was popular in the 1980s.

The gameplay amounted to watching screens within the screen, turning on lights, and shutting doors. That's because the restaurant is only "mostly abandoned" on account of its other occupants: a group of animatronic, anthropomorphic animals that come to life in the night and want to kill the new guy in the security office. Imagine the entertaining rat or the show-business bear from those real-life pizza places, which were the staple of children's birthday parties in the 1980s and '90s, with a homicidal streak, and one can probably comprehend why the concept is both wickedly amusing and slightly terrifying.

That isn't much in terms of narrative, of course. Cawthon, along with co-screenwriters Seth Cuddeback and director Emma Tammi, clearly realize this and go out of their way to compensate for it—perhaps a bit too much.

There's a lot of story—most of it exposition revealed over the course of those night (which, technically, amount to six, if memory and basic counting are to be trusted amidst so much narrative repetition)—to be found here. If that seems like a strange complaint to level against a movie based on a video game that doesn't have much in terms of plot, it's primarily because most of the plotting in this movie serves to work around and deflect from the one thing the setup has going for it: those creepy robotic creatures.

Instead, we spend most of our time with Mike (Josh Hutcherson), the guardian of his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio). He's also a guy with an abundance of grief and psychological trauma, over the death or abandonment of his parents and the abduction of his younger brother when Mike was 12. As a result, he has difficult time holding down a job, especially when he mistakes a father for a child abductor at a mall where he's working security and beats the guy in front of his own son. Mike has a lot of baggage, and considering how much missing children and child murder play into this tale, the movie has plenty of its own, too, making it a bit difficult to find the potentially twisted fun within the premise.

Anyway, he ends up taking a job at the night watchman of the local Freddy Fazbear's Pizza joint, where he sits around, wanders the place for a bit of foreshadowing, and sleeps so that he can have the same recurring nightmare of his little brother being taken by an unknown perpetrator to an unknown fate. He's convinced that the abductor's face is buried somewhere in his subconscious, waiting to be unlocked.

Yes, those animatronic animals—a fox, a rabbit, a chicken holding a vicious cupcake, the restaurant's namesake bear—eventually come to life to scare and kill some people (mostly off-screen or in silhouette, which feels like cheating about the physical logistics of how these creatures would manage murder in the first place). By the time they do, though, the filmmakers appear to have forgotten their core gimmick in favor of Mike's trauma, his relationship with a local cop (played by Elizabeth Lail) who seems to know a lot about the restaurant's past but isn't talking, and Abby and her brother's visions of several kids who disappeared decades ago.

The screenplay is so busy trying to justify some sort of supernatural logic to robots occasionally becoming sentient killing machines that the scares and the inherent humor of their existence become afterthoughts. Five Nights at Freddy's almost comes across as embarrassed about the simplicity and silliness of its central conceit. The filmmakers undercut them by trying to make a more "legitimate" movie—and not one that might be legitimately funny, scary, or both by embracing the intrinsic qualities of its gimmick.

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