‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ Turns Popular Video Game Into a Clunky and Confusing Bore 

Alci Rengifo

Director Emma Tammi’s “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is the movie equivalent of someone taking themselves way too seriously. When your movie is about a security guard facing off menacing mascot animatronics at an abandoned pizzeria, the material is screaming to be treated like midnight camp. Instead, Tammi is trying to keep the odd creatures around while pretending to make a dreary drama. Most of the audience seeing the movie in theaters or on Peacock will no doubt already be fans of its source material. It’s based on the popular video game about a security guard facing off with the pizzeria’s roaming, violent animatronics. That Blumhouse scooped up the rights to make the screen version should surprise no one. What is surprising is how slow and yawning the whole thing becomes.

The game’s lead player is turned into Mike (Josh Hutcherson), a security guard who keeps getting fired for doing things like beating up dads he mistakes for kidnappers at the mall. He’s traumatized from his younger brother having been kidnapped during a camping trip when they were children. He needs to keep working in order to retain custody of his younger sister, Abby (Piper Rubio). By chance, his boss Steve (Matthew Lillard) offers Mike the night watchman job at the abandoned Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. It used to be a popular spot in the ‘80s, now it’s just shrouded in darkness. Mike takes the gig and starts having weird episodes such as passing out, seeing visions of his brother and sensing there’s something strange behind the animatronic animal mascots, who used to perform music for customers back in the day. When Mike’s evil aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson) sends some creeps to trash the pizzeria and get Mike in trouble, Freddy Fazbear and friends come down from the stage to do some slaughtering.

There is a curious mismatch going on here of director and material. Emma Tammi is a skilled filmmaker who made “The Wind” in 2018, an atmospheric horror Western about settlers facing demons in the American frontier. It was a strong indie with memorable visuals. Tammi reunites with cinematographer Lyn Moncrief where they try to recapture some of the previous film’s tone in a screenplay by Tammi, Seth Cuddeback and the game’s creator, Scott Cawthon. But one is not made for the other. Like Chloé Zhao with Marvel’s “Eternals,” this is an absurd premise where the director seems to feel above it. With its winks at the ‘80s, as when Mike finds a creepy VHS commercial for the Pizzeria in the building, this should have been a romp akin to “Killer Klowns from Outer Space.” Tammi instead tries to make two different movies in one. First, she’s going for an unsettling trauma story involving Mike and his flashbacks, giving too much time to scenes involving lawyers, outbursts at home and face offs with the aunt. Then, she switches to a drab attempt at jump scares with the Pizzeria animatronics randomly killing characters with little reasoning. The Pizzeria itself is a letdown, lacking genuine atmosphere and instead forcing you to squint to see anything.

Fans of the game will appreciate seeing the main attractions walking around a live action setting, even if they don’t do much for most of the movie. Cupcake is here, leaping out of a fridge to face hug a victim. Foxy mostly stands around winking with its jaws agape. Chica does the same while Freddy gets lots of cute close ups. The challenge lies in how these animatronics are given no identity as film characters. They lumber around and do most of their murdering off screen, probably because Tammi, in trying to stay loyal to the look of the game, didn’t want to imagine any real action for the clunky animals. Such a scenario calls for the characters to be at the forefront, with campy glory, but here everything is performed so straight. Elizabeth Lail appears as Vanessa, a cop who crushes on Mike but serves no purpose other than looking worried. 

More fatal than the sleepy robo animals is how the plot descends to the point of making no sense, to the point of almost becoming insulting to the audience. Why the animatronics move as they do is meant to be a heartbreaking twist, yet it’s never explained in terms of how or why. When the actual villain is revealed, it’s so absurdly bad because you’re left asking even more fatal questions to the story, again involving a lot of “why?” Abby might have some gift from the beyond that is also never properly explained or even used. Those familiar with the franchise know there are novels also spun off the game. Maybe the unavoidable sequels will provide answers taken from there. “Five Nights at Freddy’s” quickly begins to feel like another case of executives at a studio deciding a movie needs to be made of this popular video game, no matter if it makes sense or not. Audiences will flock to it out of sheer recognition. 

“Five Nights at Freddy’s” releases Oct. 27 on Peacock and in theaters nationwide.