Five Nights At Freddy’s (2023) – Bearly Enough

Released: 26th October
Seen: 23rd November

In 2014, a man named Scott Cawthon released a game called Five Nights at Freddy’s. The idea of the game was incredibly simplistic, you played a bodyguard who has the job of watching over a defunct pizzeria via a set of monitors rigged up to cameras all around the building. There are only two doors into the room that can open and close and you have to just get through a series of five shifts from midnight to 6am, which is difficult because the animatronics in the restaurant are alive and are coming to get you.

As the nights go on, the game gets harder and harder and if you fail then one of the animatronics leaps at the screen creating a loud jumpscare that ends the game instantly. It’s a simple game that happened to get noticed by a certain segment of gamers who play games while overreacting on camera and soon became an obscenely popular franchise with a new game being churned out seemingly every couple of months. It was such a monster hit that a film adaptation was inevitable, indeed one was greenlit in 2015… it’s languished in production hell for 8 years but now it’s out and you can kind of tell this thing has been rewritten a couple dozen times, but it’s not like my opinion matters on the subject.

Five Nights At Freddy’s focuses on Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), a man trying his best to raise his little sister Abby (Piper Rubio) on his own while bouncing from job to job due to an anger management problem. This lack of stability is causing Mike’s aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) to try to file for custody of Abby. It’s also not helping that Mike is dealing with severe trauma due to the kidnapping of his brother back when he was a small child. All of this leads Mike to take on a job offered to him by career counselor Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard), the job is to turn up and watch the cameras at an abandoned pizzeria and make sure no one breaks in. Mike, however, mostly uses this time to take a series of naps in order to dream about the night his brother was kidnapped and try to get more information from the dream so he can catch the guy who took his little brother… taking naps might make it somewhat hard to keep an eye on the monitors and see the animatronics moving about when they aren’t supposed to.

To be blunt, Five Nights At Freddy’s is one of those films that’s basically going to be review-proof. If you’re a fan of the game franchise then there’s nothing that can be said here that will persuade you, if Scott Cawthon donating large amounts of money to Donald Trump and other literal fascists didn’t stop you from liking his work then the word of one film critic certainly isn’t going to stop you. If you are already a massive Five Nights At Freddy’s fan, this review is not for you. Go forth and enjoy the movie, I wish I could enjoy it as much as you will. For those who are still on the fence about it… OK, let’s do this.

The big problem that Five Nights At Freddy’s has is that it took a simplistic idea and overcomplicated it so much that you can tell they are desperately padding the whole thing out to achieve a feature runtime. That plot synopsis earlier leaves a lot of stuff out, like a secret plan by Aunt Jane to try and make Mike look bad so she can win custody, a cop character who is there to be part of a grand third-act reveal that only makes any sense if you’re an expert on the deep lore of the franchise (because oh fuck is there a lot of lore to this franchise) and all of it just feels like the film is desperately trying to last longer than an hour.

It can’t even really keep those plots consistent or interesting, the third act reveal of the main villain of the franchise has no real setup or build, the actor playing that role is missing for over an hour of the film and they don’t have any impact on the events that transpire which makes it hard to be scared of them or to be that invested in them being beaten, unless you know the games incredibly well.

There’s also just the central issue of Mike, who spends easily half the film asleep and dreaming about his brother. Keep in mind this entire Five Nights At Freddy’s game franchise is about watching the monitors to make sure you don’t get brutally murdered by the demon version of Chuck E. Cheese so for this film to literally have a character feel so safe in their main office that they can sleep with the door wide open for 3-hours straight and have nothing happen to them is staggering. It kills any tension that could possibly even think about being in here, which is annoying because the opening scene of the film has so much tension that it proves that this game can be translated brilliantly into a movie where the audience isn’t able to interact but instead, they pad it with so much exposition that it feels like they had a dozen ideas for a film and decided to do all of them at the same time, which killed all the potential horror that was here.

What Five Nights At Freddy’s does excel at though is translating the iconic imagery of the game into the real world, in particular the truly perfect animatronics which look exactly like the creations from the game. Knowing that they are these giant real things that the actors can interact with gives them a lot more to work with, it can be genuinely shocking to see them just pop up out of nowhere because you can tell how hard they are to move around and that makes for a lot of potentially fun moments. Now of course it also leads to some dumb moments, no one needs to see Bonnie and Freddy building a fort out of some tables and a cloth (again, kind of removes what makes them scary) but most of the time it gives them something resembling a presence that makes them at least a little intimidating at times.

Indeed for the most part Five Nights At Freddy’s looks stunning, beautiful sweeping shots really allow the audience to keep track of where everything is so you can hopefully get pulled into the world that’s been created. It’s hard to make something that feels like it’s been abandoned for several decades and the main location of this film has that very specific feeling. You could see how easy it would be to hide in this building, it’s a creative and well-filmed set that helps a few of the scares work… granted the film also indulges in heavy use of strobes which is absolutely fucking awful and unnecessary no matter the situation, but outside of those moments it’s fine to watch.

Five Nights At Freddy’s is a film made specifically for superfans who can look past every one of the glaring flaws that would make most movies almost unwatchable but if you aren’t one of those, at best it’s an acceptable first-time horror film made in a world where this idea has already been done enough times (Willy’s Wonderland and The Banana Splits Movie) that you should’ve worked out all the kinks. It abandons simplicity for just throwing everything it can think of on-screen and hoping it sticks, in the process just violently ripping out any semblance of tension that this film was trying to have. At best Five Nights At Freddy’s is just fine, but that’s being generous because with almost a decade to work out what they were doing, they should’ve worked out something better.