After over 8 long years of waiting, the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie adaptation was finally released on October 27 2023. If you were on the internet at all during 2014, then you have most likely heard of Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNAF). It is essentially a horror video game where you play as a night security guard in a chucky-cheese inspired pizzeria, with giant animatronic mascots hunting you. There has been a lot of suspense regarding the release of the film adaptation, as it was originally announced in April of 2015, only 6 months after the original Five Nights at Freddy’s video game shook the internet with its popularity in August of 2014. Since then, the production of the film faced many delays and hindrances, which only served to build up more anticipation for the eventual release. However, the film itself was rather underwhelming, a big disappointment for long-time FNAF fans like myself.
The movie follows Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), a man who can’t keep a job and is the legal guardian of his kid sister, Abby (Piper Rubio). Mike is offered a sketchy job as a night security guard at Freddy Fazebears pizzeria, and, as the name suggests, he spends five nights at Freddy’s. Here, Mike has some bizarre encounters with the animatronics at the pizzeria, meets a strange cop named Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) who is obviously hiding something, and begins to unravel the mystery behind his younger brother’s disappearance from over a decade ago.
If you’re a fan of the original FNAF games and you think this movie will be similar to those, you are mistaken. The names and animatronics are the same, but the film follows a completely different story than the games do. This actually made it more enjoyable for me. It subverted my expectations and I was able to enjoy the movie more because I didn’t know what was going to happen.
The hook itself is intriguing, but the writing fails to deliver. The movie is labeled as a horror, but there were barely any scenes that I found to be actually tense or scary. There are a lot of silly jokes, and while I don’t mind when a movie doesn’t take itself too seriously, the tonal shifts throughout this movie were pretty jarring. There are many plot points that are underdeveloped, confusing, forgotten, or rushed. The pacing in the first half of the film was really solid, it wasn’t too slow or too fast, but toward the second half of the film, I think it starts to speed up way. It felt like the creators just wanted to finish it as fast as possible, leading to an unsatisfying resolution to the film’s story.
However, even though the writing is weak, the actors really shine. Josh Hutcherson, who is fantastic in everything, is unsurprisingly also fantastic as Mike Schmidt. He is somehow able to make the seriously goofy writing slightly more tolerable, you can tell that he really put his all into this role. This is Piper Rubio’s first film, and she is definitely a child actress, by that I mean she has a lot of room for improvement, but I think she has a lot of potential to be better in future films. Rubio and Hutcherson also have really good on-screen chemistry, they feel like actual siblings, which is oddly rare in many films. Elizabeth Lail is also fantastic, I seriously got chills from some of her line deliveries. The secondary actors like Matthew Lillard and Mary Steuart Maddison were also great. There were also a few youtuber cameos who had a large impact on FNAF in the 2010s such as MatPat and CoryxKenshin. They really shined in the short scenes they had.
I went into this film having already heard spoilers about its mediocrity, but I still had hope that it would be better. I was unfortunately disappointed with the final result, especially after waiting for almost a decade. However, if you really love the FNAF game, I suggest you watch it because it is a fun, nostalgic, adaptation of the games.