Five Nights At Freddy's Review: A Campy, Gruesome, And Gloriously Funny Good Time
Kids are generally smarter than we give them credit for. For the most part, they're curious, open-minded, and understand the most fundamental truth about the world far better than adults do: that life simply makes more sense through the prism of dream logic. For every children's movie that gets this right, it feels like there are a half-dozen more that fatally underestimate their own intended audience. "Five Nights at Freddy's" can safely count itself among those in the former category, thankfully, and it weaponizes this strength to deliver the year's most charming and unabashedly kid-friendly horror flick just in time for spooky season.
Director Emma Tammi clearly recognizes the appeal of adapting a property with the unique sensibilities and labyrinthine lore dictated by this film's source material, a video game franchise that can only be generously described as "idiosyncratic." Still, the basics have been streamlined enough for even the most casual viewer to grasp. Laid out in a refreshing, matter-of-fact style (the script is co-written by Tammi, Scott Cawthon, and Seth Cuddeback, from a story by Cawthon, Chris Lee Hill, and Tyler MacIntyre), "Five Nights at Freddy's" drops viewers right into the action with a tone-setting prologue set in the eponymous family entertainment center and obviously taking inspiration from countless slashers before it. Needless to say, the gruesome fate of the unfortunate, nameless security guard at the hands of the movie's animatronic villains provides an opportunity for his successor, the woefully troubled Mike Schmidt (a pitch-perfect Josh Hutcherson), to unwittingly step into this house of horrors.
Alternately playing the character with an air of frazzled bemusement and put-upon resignation, it takes little time at all for him to win audiences over. An overzealous security incident at a prior job and the careful layering of recurring nightmares quickly establish Mike as someone with a lot to lose — not least of all because he's already experienced a loss of the most unimaginable kind. Orphaned, thrust into a parental role of looking after his headstrong young sister with a talent for drawing, Abby (Piper Rubio, nimbly carrying a difficult role that never once strays into schmaltz), and facing mounting pressure to give up custody to their self-absorbed Aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson), Mike has no choice but to accept a dead-end position at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. Little does he know that here, at this haunted Chuck E. Cheese knockoff from hell, his own childhood trauma is about to rear its ugly head.
Horror with heart
While the expert horror heads among us shouldn't expect "Five Nights at Freddy's" to reinvent the wheel, there are plenty of cleverly staged thrills, humor, and most importantly, heart, to keep the proceedings humming along at a steady and confident clip. As Mike acclimates to his creepy new surroundings — relying on sleeping pills and generic nature sounds to revisit the horrific memory of his younger brother's kidnapping while he's supposed to be on the clock — late-night visits by friendly local cop Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail, capably riding the line between secretive and trustworthy) help keep the tone just light enough for when the fireworks truly kick off in earnest. When they do and Freddy's transforms into a nightmarish, silhouetted tableau of winking neon lights and deep shadows — cinematographer Lyn Moncrief and his ever-roving camera wrings as much tension as possible out of a main setting that frequently feels like an ever-shifting maze — the violence skirts right to the edge of its PG-13 rating. It'll successfully put a fright in the kiddies in attendance while earning more than a few winces from grown-ups.
Most impressively of all, however, the film devotes quite a bit of breathing room to explore weightier themes than audiences may be expecting. Mike isn't so much haunted by dreams of the brother he once lost as he is actively punishing himself, reliving such memories in an obsessive attempt to rewrite his past at the expense of living in the moment. The inherently dreamlike quality of the story soon becomes part of the actual text, in fact. Just as Mike's dreams while napping at Freddy's begin to blur the line between fantasy and reality, repeatedly interrupted by five oddly stilted children, Abby's enigmatic drawings reflect the terrible truth Mike has lived with all these years ... but could never bring himself to actually talk about with his sister. "Pictures mean something," Abby's teacher earnestly explains to Mike at one point, and it doesn't take long for "Five Nights at Freddy's" to take this idea of the importance of images and visuals much more literally.
At the heart of it all remains the bond between Mike and Abby, providing a strong backbone to keep our emotional investment at a fever pitch.
Getting the job done
Longtime fans, horror-hungry newcomers, and film nerds alike are sure to walk away satisfied by how competently "Five Nights at Freddy's" tells its main story — a compliment that might seem like damning with faint praise, but is meant as the highest possible accolade. Evoking a low-budget, minimalist sense of filmmaking, there's an immense amount of fun to be derived from Tammi's innate, almost Hitchcockian understanding of old-school shooting techniques and barebones scares. The director's bag of tricks includes everything from sudden flashes of shadows to brazenly telegraphed jump-scares to delightfully off-kilter close-ups of hokey-looking animatronics, all adding up to set "Five Nights at Freddy's" apart from countless of its style-over-substance peers. This is style with a purpose, turning what could've been a lazy B-movie into something akin to a children's magic show — we know how the illusionist pulls off (most of) their tricks, and we know exactly to what effect, but we can't help but laugh along and allow ourselves to be charmed, anyway.
What "Five Nights at Freddy's" lacks in a robust story — an unexpected plot turn about halfway through feels like a genuinely bold curveball, though it's tempered somewhat by a slightly too neat-and-tidy ending — it more than makes up for with a penchant for oddball theatrics and flair. This is a movie where the main animatronic villains (the voice cast includes Kevin Foster Freddy Fazbear, Jade Kindar-Martin as Bonnie, Jessica Weiss as Chica, and Roger Joseph Manning Jr. as Foxy) will inspire laughs just as much as gasps, where the casting of Matthew Lillard as Mike's career counselor becomes a perfect ode to a beloved scream king of an entire generation, and where moments of genuine peril coexist simultaneously with the hysterics of a perpetually spaced-out lawyer or a taxi driver resignedly taking a possessed giant robot as a fare.
"Five Nights at Freddy's" will undoubtedly reward those who meet it halfway and engage with it on its own level. Perhaps the biggest pleasant surprise of 2023, this is one horror flick that seems destined to become a sleepover favorite. All it requires is channeling your inner child and allowing yourself to be swept along for the ride.
/Film rating: 7 out of 10
"Five Nights at Freddy's" releases simultaneously in theaters and on Peacock on October 27, 2023.