Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 (2025) – Upgrade

Released: 4th December
Seen: 4th December

In 2023, the long-awaited movie adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s came out to a pretty harsh critical reaction (myself included, I was not the biggest fan of it for a myriad of reasons) and a box office take that most films would kill to get. It was truly a sensation, bringing in about 300 million on a 20 million budget which makes sense because this franchise is basically review-proof. That’s the kind of return on investment that guarantees a sequel. It was inevitable that one was going to come out and probably quickly and sure enough, here we are with the second film, and to give the filmmakers credit, they seem to have paid attention to the problems that people had with the first one and have vastly improved things. 

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 takes place a very short time after the first movie. Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is trying his best to maintain something resembling a normal life, remodelling his house and the like while also still raising his sister Abby (Piper Rubio). Abby is trying her best in school, even taking a robotics class but her teacher seems to hate her for no reason, though the students like her because of the stories she tells about her previous adventures with Freddy and his furry friends. Meanwhile, Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) is having nightmares about her childhood, having still not fully dealt with what her father, William Afton (Matthew Lillard) did during his reign of terror. One big thing that she hasn’t dealt with is the murder of her childhood friend Charlotte (Audrey Lynn-Marie), who died in 1982 at the hands of her father and now seems to be possessing one of the robots at the original Freddy’s Pizzeria location. Mike, Abby and Vanessa are going to have to team up again to help the ghost of Charlotte rest, and hopefully avoid having the animatronics see what the inside of their heads looks like.

Right away you can feel that the film makers paid attention to a lot of criticism, they understand that most people are here to be scared by the animatronics and so instead of cutesy montages of everyone being friendly to these giant creatures they are actually given some sense of menace this time around, actually feeling somewhat dangerous to everyone including our main trio. This time they’re more violent, more creepy and a lot smarter in how they move about. There’s actually tension this time around, some of the jumpscares are genuinely shocking and there’s a few times I was stunned that they got some of the violence past the ratings board with only an M. They don’t spend half the film just dancing about in some weird dream, cutting back to a sleeping Josh Hutcherson, they actually make sure that this time we are going to be goddamn scared which is great.

They also really make sure each time the robots go to do a murder that it’s actually intense (in terms of what you would expect from this franchise, the bar is different here than it might be for a Terrifier film, we all understand that, right?), wonderfully filmed in a way that implies so much more than you would expect. These animatronics aren’t just going to shove you into a suit and let the suit take care of you; they’re more than happy to just crush your skull if it’ll get the job done. It makes for some really shocking moments that’re handled wonderfully on a visual level, the use of subtle tricks like the glowing eyes or a tiny head movement helps make the tension build in ways that help set this apart from the first one. Sure, Abby is still behaving way too childlike and trusting the giant deathbots more than she should, considering what happened last time, but at least that means we can have actual tense moments wondering if Chica is going to eat Abby for lunch!

Now, people who saw the first film may have read earlier and went “Wait, wasn’t Vanessa in a coma at the end of the first movie?” and you are correct. One of this film’s big problems is that it almost forgets that there was a previous film for large chunks of it. Vanessa got out of her coma off screen, Abby is now in a completely different school than she used to be for no apparent reason, people know about Freddy’s well enough for there to be a festival dedicated to it but not well enough for Mike to have heard about the original location, I can go on like this if I had to but it’s just kind of annoying for them to reset so much and ignore big chunks of the first movie. If anything, it’s moments when this film is markedly different from the first and the characters know it that give it tension, like Mike realising there aren’t any doors in the security office, it makes for a much more tense scene because we know the character’s old tricks won’t work.

When Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 stumbles it really is quite sad because it really detracts from things and you can feel it slow down, getting bogged down in its attempt at more lore (which I get, overanalysing a game about making people jump a lot because of loud noises is why this thing got popular to begin with) in exchange for making some parts of the story feel uneven. When the film actually works, it can be fun and quite creepy, but when they miss it makes you wonder why you bothered turning up.

Like I said at the start, Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 is basically review-proof, this whole franchise is. I saw 2 people at my screening cosplaying as a nightguards with one of the killers attached to them. Kids love this franchise and nothing any reviewer says will matter in the long run. If it means anything, it must be pointed out that this film is a vast improvement on the first. They removed a lot of the weaker stuff that just didn’t matter and replaced it with more actual scares from this mess of murderous machines, they kept the stuff that really worked well (namely the practical animatronics which look as great as ever) and they seem to have something resembling a plan for the franchise. It’s enough of an improvement that if this is an early horror film for someone it’s not the worst stepping stone into the genre that I could imagine. It’s still got a lot of broken parts and it’s not something I’d choose to watch again, but it’s not as bad as it could’ve been.