Five Nights at Freddy's movie review (2023) – Roger Ebert

make sense of “5 Nights at Freddy’s,” a family-friendly horror thriller a couple of safety guard who discovers and should defend himself from a gang of creepy animal robots? “5 Nights at Freddy’s” was tailored from the favored video video games by three co-writers: sequence creator Scott Cawthon, director Emma Tammi, and Scott Cuddeback. It’s fairly bloody for a PG-13-rated horror film, although it’s in all probability not as grisly as you may anticipate should you’ve performed the video games. Tammi’s film additionally spans 110 minutes, which could shock viewers given how fast-paced and over-edited many scenes are. 

However none of this may shock the video games’ followers, who’re presumably accustomed to the film’s eerie tone and still-expanding meta-narrative. But whereas there’s sufficient ambient dread on this “5 Nights at Freddy’s” function to point why the video video games are so well-liked, there’s extra by-the-numbers plotting than wanted.

Tammi’s “5 Nights at Freddy’s” usually seems like a pre-teen dream of what a horror film needs to be, stuffed with incidental particulars that tease deeper and stranger avenues to be explored in future spinoffs. Should you just like the video games, you want poking across the characters’ world and studying about their backstories, which have grown exponentially stranger and extra elaborate after numerous sequels and aspect venture expansions. The film’s important story is anemic by comparability, although it’s nonetheless sturdy sufficient, given its creators’ diligent consideration to acquainted dialogue and story beats. 

Safety guard Mike (Josh Hutcherson) agrees to look at over Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a family-friendly pizzeria and online game arcade that shut down within the Eighties after some mysterious little one disappearances. Mike would somewhat not work the evening shift at a decrepit “Chuck E. Cheese”-type leisure middle, as he tells the pleasant however mysterious cop Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail). Then once more, Mike’s job prospects are slim, and he wants cash to maintain custody of his sister Abby (Piper Rubio). 

If Mike doesn’t keep employed, his scheming aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) will take Abby away simply to gather little one assist checks. Mike additionally suffers from recurring lucid nightmares concerning the abduction of his younger brother Garrett (Lucas Grant); these desires solely develop extra troubling and vivid whereas he’s employed at Freddy’s. Additionally, the pizzeria’s singing animal robots typically come alive at evening and is perhaps possessed by ghosts.

Mike’s story in all probability might by no means have been as compelling because the sheer presence of Freddy (Kevin Foster), a lumbering animatronic bear, and his friends, Bonnie (Jade Kindar-Martin), Chica (Jess Weiss), Cupcake, and Cunning. Nonetheless, why hassle with a character-driven story in case your supply materials is a online game whose important allure stems from its gamers’ capability to discover a haunted and more and more threatening setting? 

Hiring Tammi was an amazing concept, in idea, since her hallucinatory 2019 horror-western “The Wind” has way more ambiance than plot. The perfect components of “5 Nights at Freddy’s” replicate Tammi’s consideration to evocative particulars, which trace at suppressed reminiscences and darkish secrets and techniques, like soda spilling over a picnic desk in Mike’s dream or the blinking mild bulbs that line the doorway to Freddy Fazbear’s. There are finally too many empty symbols of curdled nostalgia, like fluttering TV displays, peppy pop songs, and carbon-dated TV commercials. Nonetheless, it’s good to see the filmmakers do this laborious to copy the video video games’ concentrate on analog objects, which, regardless of their already quaint antiquity, can even take us again to the unremembered previous.