FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S (2023)

Studio:   Universal/Blumhouse
Director: Emma Tammi
Writer:   Scott Cawthon, Seth Cuddeback, Emma Tammi
Producer: Scott Cawthon, Jason Blum
Stars:    Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Mary Stuart Masterson, Matthew Lillard

Review Score:

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Summary:

A security guard must save his sister from murderous animatronic characters inside an abandoned pizzeria that hides a mystery involving missing children.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Mike Schmidt, who suffers from chronic nightmares where he remembers his brother Garrett being abducted when they were both children, loses his job as a mall security guard for beating up a father he mistook for a kidnapper. Career counselor Steve Raglan offers Mike another, less desirable security guard job, but Mike declines because it is a night shift and he needs to take care of his orphaned younger sister Abby.

Mike and Abby's aunt Jane brings her lawyer Doug to a meeting with Mike and Dr. Lillian, who supervises Abby's wellbeing. Aunt Jane threatens to forcibly take custody of Abby away from Mike. Mike privately tells the doctor that Jane only wants the welfare payment that would come with Abby. Dr. Lillian advises Mike to find a job so he can look like a responsible guardian.

Mike calls back Steve Raglan. Steve hires Mike as the overnight security guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza Place, a family restaurant that was popular in the 1980s, but has been abandoned ever since several children mysteriously disappeared there.

Aided by prescription pills, Mike falls asleep during his first night on the job. Mike dreams of his brother Garrett being kidnapped by a mystery man, and also of meeting five ghost children who run away from Mike when he tries talking to them.

Mike returns home in the morning to relieve Abby's babysitter Max. Max and her brother Jeff then meet Aunt Jane and her lawyer at Spark's Diner. Max reports that she was unable to uncover any evidence of criminal activity while secretly searching Mike's house. Still anxious to be paid the money Jane promised for digging up dirt on Mike, Jeff proposes vandalizing the restaurant so Mike loses another job.

During his second night at Freddy's, Mike again dreams of the five ghost children. This time, one of the children slashes Mike with a blade, and he strangely wakes with a gouge on his arm in real life.

Police officer Vanessa Shelly introduces herself to Mike. Vanessa shows Mike the restaurant's animatronic characters, which include Freddy, Foxy, Bonnie, Chica, and Cupcake, and also tells Mike about the children who went missing.

After Mike's shift ends, Jeff, Max, and their accomplices Hank and Carl break in to smash up the restaurant. The animatronic characters supernaturally come to life. Chica kills Carl. Bonnie kills Hank. Foxy kills Jeff. A ghost child lures Max to a Freddy costume where she too is violently killed.

Vanessa goes to Mike's house to tell him about the break-in. Having discovered his medication, Vanessa warns that Mike's nightly blackouts might make him liable for the property damage.

Mike confides in Vanessa that his sleep disorder comes from the trauma of his brother's abduction. Mike tells Vanessa he believes the kidnapper's identity is hidden inside a memory he can only unlock with help from the children in his dreams.

With Max not answering his calls, Mike is forced to bring Abby with him to his third night shift at Freddy's. During his next dream of the ghost children, Mike bargains to give them whatever they want in exchange for help remembering who took his brother. The lead boy draws a rabbit figure in the dirt and disappears.

Mike wakes to Abby's screams. Mike discovers Abby was merely being tickled by the animatronic characters. Abby introduces Freddy and the others as her friends. Stunned that they appear to be inexplicably alive, Mike isn't sure what to think.

Upon returning home, Mike sees that Abby drew several pictures linking the ghost children to the animatronics. When he asks Abby about it, she explains that the ghost children make the characters move.

Mike also asks Abby about a picture she drew of Garrett's kidnapping despite her not being alive when it happened. Mike asks if she can help him learn the kidnapper's identity from the ghost children, but Abby responds that the ghost children only want to talk about a yellow rabbit.

Mike and Abby arrive at Freddy's for his fourth night to find Vanessa there. Vanessa confirms she knew about the ghost-possessed robots as the three of them build a fort with the animatronics. Mike tells Vanessa he believes the ghosts can help him learn what happened to his brother if Abby is able to communicate with them. Vanessa insists that Mike needs to let it go. Refusing to say what it is that terrifies her inside a storage room, Vanessa further warns she will shoot Mike if he brings Abby back to Freddy's ever again.

With no other options available, Mike has Aunt Jane babysit Abby during his fifth night shift. At the restaurant, Mike takes his sleeping pills so he can dream of the ghost children. The ghosts show Mike an alternate dream where he and Garrett live happily with their parents. The ghosts promise Mike can have that dream every night if he brings them Abby. Mike initially agrees, but when he suddenly changes his mind, the children slash at him. Mike wakes inside an animatronic torture device, which he escapes only to be attacked by Foxy.

Golden Freddy attacks Jane inside Mike's house. A ghost boy then convinces Abby to go back to Freddy's with him in a taxi.

Mike recovers to find Vanessa, who rescued him from Foxy, treating his wounds at a police supply outpost. Vanessa tells Mike that the ghost children want to turn Abby into an animatronic like them. Vanessa further reveals that the man who killed the children hid their bodies inside the animatronics, which is why police never found them when they searched the restaurant and why their ghosts inhabit those robots. Vanessa finally confesses that the murderer is William Afton, the creator of Freddy Fazbear's and also her father, and he has the ability to influence the ghost children. Vanessa arms Mike with weapons before sending him back to Freddy's to save Abby.

Mike sneaks into the restaurant for a confrontation with the animatronics. Vanessa arrives to help rescue Abby while Mike faces off with a yellow rabbit animatronic named Springtrap. Springtrap unmasks to reveal career counselor Steve Raglan, who was really William Afton all along, underneath.

As Vanessa takes over the fight with her father, Mike realizes Afton can control the animatronics because he brainwashed the ghost children. Mike instructs Abby to show the animatronics the truth about Afton through drawings. Abby replaces a happy picture of Springtrap and the children with one where an evil Springtrap murders them. Their memories finally triggered, the animatronics turn on Afton to torture and kill him. Afton vows to come back no matter what. Mike and Abby use the opportunity to escape the restaurant with a wounded Vanessa, who was stabbed by her father during their showdown.

Mike and Abby resume their lives while Vanessa is hospitalized in a coma. Abby asks her brother if she can visit her friends at Freddy's again, but Mike isn't sure how to respond. Meanwhile, the taxi driver who drove Abby to the restaurant has an encounter with Balloon Boy.

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Review:

A couple of different options occurred to me when it came time to frame this review of "Five Nights at Freddy's."

My initial idea was to draw a parallel between events from the film and the actual experience of working at a Chuck E. Cheese, which is where I had my first minimum wage job. If anyone can understand what it's like for main character Mike to be alone in a dark dining room with a creepy quintet of dead-eyed animatronics, it's someone who saw that same situation on a nightly basis way back when I was 16.

Then I considered coming at the adaptation as a gamer. With the exception of the fourth one, which posed a problem by being heavily reliant on audio cues that require high-grade headphones, I've played all the way through the first five games in the FNAF series. I've swum deep enough in the source material to know a lot about the lore, the look, and the Easter eggs that bring the game's dark, digital world to live-action life onscreen.

I also thought about covering "Five Nights at Freddy's" as a pop culture phenomenon. Beyond toys, graphic novels, and other assorted merchandise, FNAF has a massive online presence, overall influence, and associations with YouTube personalities I don't fully understand, although kids certainly seem to. Even though he's never played the games because he's too afraid they'll give him nightmares, one of my nephews can rattle off so many esoteric details about each Freddy Fazbear character, even the game's creator would be like, "Hold on, huh?"

Despite all of these choices for how to position this piece, nothing stood out as an obvious avenue to pursue. That's because I simply don't have a strong opinion of the film one way or another. Maybe that's a condensed review right there. Here's a property whose main games I've all played, whose cross-generational impact resonates so widely that I have to have a mandatory conversation about it with children at every family get-together, and whose premise ties directly into my personal past, yet all I really have to say about "Five Nights at Freddy's" is "eh, whatever" like I would any other ordinary horror movie.

Mike has had a hard life. As a kid, he watched a mystery man abduct his brother Garrett. As an adult, Mike faces the danger of losing custody of his little sister Abby, partly because his childhood trauma makes it hard to hold onto a job.

Mike's break comes when he lands an overnight security gig at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza Place. Its awesome arcade, birthday events, and colorful cast of animatronic animals lip-synching to The Romantics made Freddy's pretty popular in the 1980s. Then a couple of kids mysteriously went missing and the building has been abandoned ever since.

Mike eventually becomes acquainted with the restaurant's robotic residents: Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, and Cupcake, although they don't actually activate until over a half-hour has elapsed. Oh, there's a cold open kill like all big studio horror flicks are required to have prior to opening credits. But Freddy and friends don't kill again for 40 more minutes, which is a near-interminable amount of time to keep a thirsty audience waiting before turning on the movie's main attraction.

Before what follows, it's worth noting I'm not normally someone who automatically thinks less of horror movies with PG-13 ratings. The deeper debate can be had another time, but I don't believe the step down from R necessarily dictates a corresponding cut in how frightening a film can be. Goriness, sure. But terror and gore aren't an inseparable association.

Having clarified that, I might nevertheless lean toward the side of those who claim the PG-13 sticker does "Five Nights at Freddy's" few favors. Obviously, the film has to be accessible to the tween set who are responsible for a large chunk of sustained interest in FNAF in the first place, so the PG-13 has to be understood as essential to the movie's monetary success. But I don't think it has to concurrently mandate all murders and mayhem must occur away from the audience's eyes like it does in this film. I guess someone could argue that since the FNAF games take place in first-person view, technically all of the player's deaths occur offscreen. Except movies are as visual as mediums get. To transport Freddy onto a cinematic stage while leaving almost all of his actions unseen should be a punishable crime for a horror filmmaker committing malpractice.

Unquestionably, the biggest feather in the film's cap goes to the outstanding design work of Jim Henson's Creature Shop. It's impossible to imagine anyone doing a better job of recreating Freddy, Foxy, Chica, Cupcake, and Bonnie in all their ghoulish glory. Everyone looks exactly like they came straight from the game by way of a lifetime nightmare certain to haunt countless children for years yet to come.

It's strange for the script to have this army of awesome animatronics at its disposal, yet still choose to repeatedly slow down momentum with the human sides of its story. One of those sides involves a woman whose serendipitous appearances are rivaled only by Silent Hill's Cybil Bennett in terms of local police officers who ride in out of nowhere with cryptic intentions and a heap of exposition they won't reveal until fit hits the shan first. On one costumed paw, FNAF's focus on personal drama builds real relationships with real stakes for real people. On the other paw, those themes of abductions, murders, and puppet possessions involving children make for a bleak mood that's warranted by the story, but not as warmly welcomed by viewers who want more animatronic anarchy than the movie depicts.

Age, affinity for FNAF, and general familiarity with horror tropes are some of the variables determining what and how much any one person will get out of "Five Nights at Freddy's." The film has some good stuff, like cool creatures, eerie atmosphere, and a tragic mystery driving the plot. It also has some not-so-good stuff, like predictable plot beats, too much time spent outside the restaurant, and a shocking scarcity of things to make someone scream. If there's any one horror movie that would be immune to the common criticism of overusing cheap jump scares, it's the adaptation of a game series that is quite literally based entirely around jump scares, yet "Five Nights at Freddy's" oddly ignores its free pass.

It's trivial to pose generalizations landing on both sides of the line, but again, "Five Nights at Freddy's" really is like any other ordinary horror movie, so a "well, whatever" reaction seems warranted. Looking ahead to the inevitable sequel, now that the movie's mythology is firmly established, maybe the creators can let loose for the freaky fun folks expected to see explode in this one. At a minimum, I'm merely hoping for a movie that moves me to write a review more exciting than a 1000-word equivalent of "it is what it is."

NOTE: There is a mid-credits scene.

Review Score: 60

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