Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023) Review

So, what’s the big deal with Five Nights at Freddy’s? I’ve never played the game before, but here’s what I gathered: It was a popular 2014 point-and-click horror video game that spawned eight instalments so far. Apparently, what made the first game such a phenomenal hit was its deceptively simple objective — you play as a night guard working five nights in a row at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. You have to deal with limited power supplies, and if that’s not enough, you need to watch out for the animatronics that come to life and survive the nights. And of course, elements of jump scares that defined the first game.

The film adaptation, however, turns out to be a yawner of a flat-footed supernatural horror. We get the first 20 minutes establishing the character played by Josh Hutcherson as Mike Schmidt. After he gets fired from his mall cop job for assaulting a man, he ends up meeting career counsellor Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard). Steve offers him a job to work at a long-abandoned pizza place called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza as a night guard. Mike hesitates at first but reluctantly agrees after he discovers his obnoxious aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) is looking to fight for custody of his younger sister, Abby (Piper Rubio).

We also learn that Mike suffers from insomnia and relies heavily on sleeping pills. He is constantly haunted by recurring dreams of his childhood past, which have to do with his missing little brother.

So, Mike eventually takes on a night guard job. Strange things happen and it’s not just the dark and derelict interior but also the possessed animatronics roaming around the place. There’s a police officer named Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail of Netflix’s You series), who seems to know a lot of things about Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. The sad thing is, her character mainly served as an exposition dump and there is little chemistry between Lail and Hutcherson.

Speaking of Hutcherson, he does his best playing a traumatic character who can’t get over his little brother’s disappearance. But the movie spends too much time on him dealing with his personal demons and not enough haunting of the animatronics at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. For a movie that carries such a title, I was expecting the story would focus on the claustrophobic tension and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night moments within the confines of the abandoned pizzeria.

Instead, the so-called “five nights” in the title is more of an on-and-off situation of Mike’s never-ending trauma and his heavy-handed backstory. This reminds me of the ill-fated Haunted Mansion remake, where the movie tries to be more than just a story about the characters trapped in a haunted house.

The mainstream-friendly rating doesn’t help either as director Emma Tammi could only muster a few uninspired and bloodless deaths and cheap jump scares. The nearly two-hour length just drags on and on with more exposition-heavy scenes and the stakes are unbelievably low for a supernatural-horror movie.

As for the animatronics, this is where the movie excels the most. They look creepy and faithful to the video game characters and above all, they are actually created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop instead of rendering them entirely CGI. It’s just too bad the impressive practicality of the animatronics is sadly undermined by the lack of their presence. It sure makes me feel like they are more of an afterthought rather than something integral to the story.

Five Nights at Freddy’s has been long in development, stretching back to 2015 when it was first announced its big-screen adaptation. Gil Kenan and Chris Columbus were respectively attached to direct but none of them could make it past the pre-production stage. It would take eight years before the much-anticipated film finally saw the light of day.

Well, so much for the anticipation. A supernatural horror, which is severely devoid of genuine scares and palpable tension that fails to capitalise on the huge popularity of its video game.