This hybrid ghost- / animatronic-horror movie coasts on a mixture of good visuals and the good chemistry of the sibling pair at its core but regularly slams into walls of non-sense. More a missed-chance than modern classic but fair enough when it just lets the cast shut up and the screen do the talking.
Summary
(from Blumhouse) The film follows a troubled security guard as he begins working at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. While spending his first night on the job, he realizes the night shift at Freddy’s won’t be so easy to make it through.
[Doug’s Note: the official summary leaves out that a significant portion of the movie is dedicated to the main character struggling to care for his younger sister, which is impetus for the job. It’s a lot of the flavor so I’m adding it in.]
Content Warning
Not a lot of gore but a fair bit of implied pain. Plot heavily leans into the death and kidnapping of multiple children. At least one decapitation scene in silhouette. A fair bit of family manipulation. Questionable handling of grief and trauma.
Review [Spoilers: None, Really]
First off, I’m not really a fan of Five Nights at Freddy’s.1
By which I mean the media franchise as a whole (but also the movie). I like it ok. I get some of the references when I see them in the wild. I have a single piece of FNaF merchandise [not including the movie]. I played the first game and had an just-ok time for the short duration it lasts and never really looked back. I appreciated it more than enjoyed it.
The movie, therefore, blew largely past my radar even with an appreciation for both Blumhouse and Josh Hutcherson. Sequel came up around the time we were moving out of country and it likewise got shelved.
Then it kept coming up in a few online spaces and while the official critical rating was low, I also know you have to tread a careful line applying traditional critical consensus to genre. Genre movies are rarely fully reflected in Rotten Tomato scores. Every time a horror movie does well, we get the “It’s not really horror, it’s actually a study in blah blah” dynamic. Horror movies are mostly left alone from such games when they sit down in the <70% range.
And 2023’s Five Night at Freddy’s is very much so in the “under 70%” range. I won’t give it a score. I don’t do that, here. It is just a flawed movie that feels like twenty ideas were tossed with force at a soft wall and then seven or eight of them that stuck longest were kept no matter where they landed or how broken they ended up.
We have ghosts. We have kidnappings. We have egregious custody battles. We have failures to process grief. We have metal killing machines. When have empathy with the monster(s). We have single-sibling-as-parents drama. We have betrayals. We have some deaths that are borderline impossible to have happened how they happened (at least, not without much great consequence). We have family trauma that is crushed by its placement in the script. We also have several exposition dumps that sound like they were written to see if the audience is listening because if the audience is listening then the audience is confused.
Toss the story out and lock the door. It doesn’t help. It actively hurts in several places.
Probably toss the ghosts out, too. Same issue. Maybe that’s deep lore to the FNaF franchise. I barely care. It causes the movie to feel like an exercise in cognitive dissonance.
I can get what part the custody battle is playing but the movie dials it up to eleven and then puts it away into a box, so I lean to not so much tossing it out as ripping out its wiring and trying again.
If this movie wasn’t rewritten a few times to try and make-it-make-sense, I’d be shocked.
Josh Hutcherson? I liked his part. Piper Rubio? Liked hers though I feel the movie tried shifting her from neurodivergent to “simply grief stricken” around the half-way mark and that feels weird [but hey, she effectively played two characters]. I will stand on a hill and praise Matthew Lillard all day long though he doesn’t really have much to chew on, here. Elizabeth Lail worked about as well as she could with what she had and good lord almighty at what she had to deliver with emotion.
Big props to director Emma Tammi and cinematographer Lyn Moncrief and all the editors and such that managed to walk a very fine line between making the movie its own thing but diving into the style of the game. Shots like looking up through the ball pit? So very nice. Little flashes of stuff going on in the background that nailed a vibe. I also liked the pacing and the sound design. A few of the song choices were a bit off at times, but overall the effects hit like a cold breath on the back of the neck. Present at exactly the right amount.
And the Jim Henson Creature Shop design department? Bless them for existing.
This movie speaks the absolute loudest when no one is talking and no one, absolutely no one, is getting anywhere near a storyline they will feel the need to explain.
Will I watch the sequel? It has McKenna Grace and Josh Hutcherson. Heck yeah, I will. I just feel like I am more aligned with what to expect, now.
- I am glad to see a franchise for doing its very best to build back up the well-deserved fear of animatronics and abandoned kid-coded spaces. That’s nice. ↩︎