Five Nights at Freddy’s arrived in 2023 carrying a decade of fan expectation, a PG-13 rating, and a day-one streaming release on Peacock alongside its theatrical run. The film runs 110 minutes. Emma Tammi directed it, and wrote the script with Seth Cuddeback and Scott Cawthon, the creator of the game series. Jason Blum produced it with Cawthon. Its tagline asks: “Can you survive five nights?” The answer, at 3.3 out of 10, is that the audience barely survives one.
Trailer, via Blumhouse.
Josh Hutcherson as Mike Schmidt
The premise is thin but workable. Mike Schmidt, played by Josh Hutcherson, is a mall security guard who gets fired for assaulting a father he mistook for a kidnapper. His career counselor, Steve Raglan, offers him a night guard job at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a shuttered pizzeria. Mike takes it because social services are threatening to take custody of his younger sister, Abby, and hand her to their estranged aunt, Jane, who wants the monthly custody payments.
That is the whole engine of the movie: a man needs a paycheck to keep his sister. It is a real motive, and Hutcherson plays it straight. The trouble is that the film keeps interrupting him with dreams.
The Dreams of Garrett Schmidt
Mike’s younger brother, Garrett, was abducted when they were children. Every night at the pizzeria, Mike falls asleep and dreams about it. In the dreams he meets five children who also witnessed the abduction. These dreams are the film’s attempt at emotional weight, and they are its heaviest dead air.
The dreams do not build. They repeat. By the time the film returns to the same memory again, it has spent its scares and its runtime on a mystery the audience solved in the first act.
Jim Henson’s Creature Shop Built the Mascots
Here is where Five Nights at Freddy’s earns its keep. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop built the animatronics, and they are practical. Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy and Mr. Cupcake are physical objects on set, and they look it. Kevin Foster performs as Freddy, Jade Kindar-Martin as Bonnie, Jess Weiss as Chica. Kellen Goff performs the scattered pirate song Foxy sings through the film.
A gang of vandals breaks into the pizzeria, and the mascots kill all of them. That sequence is the best thing in the movie. It is mean, it is fast, and it does not explain itself.
Vanessa Shelly and the Yellow Rabbit
Elizabeth Lail plays Vanessa Shelly, a local police officer who tells Mike the building closed in the 1980s after several children went missing there. She warns him not to touch the springlock suits, which contain internal gears with a faulty design that can impale the wearer.
The children’s spirits possess the animatronics. They keep mentioning a “yellow rabbit.” Matthew Lillard plays William Afton, the serial child murderer behind it all, who first appears as the alias Steve Raglan. Lillard is having fun. The film gives him almost nothing to do until the end.
Piper Rubio, Mary Stuart Masterson and the Supporting Cast
Piper Rubio plays Abby, Mike’s younger sister. Mary Stuart Masterson plays Aunt Jane, who hires the vandals to trash the pizzeria and get Mike fired so she can take Abby faster. Kat Conner Sterling plays Max, Abby’s babysitter and a member of that gang. David Lind plays Jeff, the gang’s leader and Max’s brother.
The supporting cast is doing competent work inside a script that gives them one note each. Jane is greedy. Max is disposable. Jeff is disposable with a name.
Eight Years of Delays Before This Film
This movie took years to reach screens, and the seams show. Development began in April 2015 under Warner Bros. Pictures, with Roy Lee, Seth Grahame-Smith and David Katzenberg producing and Gil Kenan directing. After delays, the project moved to Blumhouse Productions in March 2017, and Kenan resigned that May. Chris Columbus was hired to direct and write in February 2018, went through rewrites, and left. Tammi replaced him in October 2022.
Principal photography ran from February to April 2023 in New Orleans and surrounding communities. A film that changes directors three times and writers more often tends to arrive with too many hands on it. This one does.
What Five Nights at Freddy’s Gets Wrong
Ranked by how much they hurt the film:
- The dream sequences. They are the film’s central mechanic and its biggest failure, because they explain instead of scare.
- The pacing. At 110 minutes, the middle stretch sags badly, and the film has no idea what to do with Mike between shifts.
- The rating. A PG-13 horror film about murdered children has to imply almost everything, and this one implies until the tension drains out.
- The mystery. The film treats the yellow rabbit as a reveal. Anyone who has played the games, or read the cast list, knew in December 2022.
The animatronics, the vandals’ death scene and Lillard’s brief turn are the parts that work. Everything holding them together does not.
The Case for the Fans
There is a version of this review that says the film was never for critics. That is true and also irrelevant. A movie can serve its fandom and still be judged on whether it works as a movie, and this one does not.
- The practical animatronics honor the source material.
- The lore references are present for people who want them.
- The runtime is reasonable.
- The cast is not the problem.
None of that fixes a script that keeps falling asleep on itself.
The Verdict on Five Nights at Freddy’s
Five Nights at Freddy’s is a horror film with one good idea and no idea how to hold it. The animatronics are real, heavy and threatening. The movie around them is weightless.
Tammi and her co-writers built the film on Mike’s dreams, which is the wrong foundation. Dreams have no rules, so nothing in them can be frightening. The pizzeria, by contrast, has rules: don’t touch the suits, don’t stay past your shift, don’t let the mascots near your sister. Those rules are where the tension lives, and the film abandons them for most of its middle hour.
The vandals’ deaths prove the point. That scene works because it is simple, physical and final. The animatronics kill a group of people who broke in, and the film does not stop to explain why. Every other set piece stops to explain why.
Lillard is the other bright spot, and his screen time is a waste of a good villain. Afton is the franchise’s central figure, a serial child murderer who hid behind an alias and a career counseling office. The film saves him for a finale that arrives too late and ends too fast.
The published critical score for Five Nights at Freddy’s sits at 3.3 out of 10, with a Metacritic score of 33 out of 100. That is the right neighborhood. This is not a disaster. It is a film with a real budget, a real creature shop and a real lead performance that cannot decide whether it wants to be a haunted house or a grief drama, and so it is neither.
Fans of the games will find the animatronics they came for. Everyone else will find a movie that asks them to survive five nights and gives them very little reason to stay awake for them.
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