Five Nights at Freddy's

The Weight of Plastic and Nostalgia

There has always been something off about animatronics to me. Long before the internet collectively decided they were nightmare fuel, those clanking mascots at Chuck E. Cheese already looked like they were hiding a threat behind the hydraulic grin. So by the time a film version of *Five Nights at Freddy's* finally showed up in 2023, I was hoping for a stripped-down haunted-house sprint. What Emma Tammi delivers instead is a weirdly sincere family melodrama with bursts of robot violence dropped in. I honestly still don't know who it's meant for.

Maybe the answer is the diehard fans who spent years untangling lore on YouTube. For everyone else, though, the movie spends most of its runtime acting unsure of itself. It keeps wandering away from the pizzeria and sinking into custody fights and trauma therapy. If you buy a ticket to giant possessed robot animals, you expect some camp, or at least suspense with teeth. Tammi plays it all with such grave seriousness that the absurd premise never quite clicks into place.



Whenever the movie gives the Jim Henson Creature Shop creations the screen, it wakes up. Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy have real weight to them. They don’t move like airy CGI inventions; they look grimy, bulky, and capable of damage. There’s genuine tactile menace in the way they stalk those neon-smeared hallways. Then the script—co-written by Scott Cawthon—starts explaining itself again. It drains the monsters of mystery by folding them into a tangled backstory about kidnapped children and dream logic.

Look at the recurring dream material. Mike forces himself to sleep every night, trying to dig up buried memories of his brother’s abduction. These scenes unfold in the blunt daylight of a forest, which completely breaks the nocturnal claustrophobia the pizzeria should be building. The movie gets caught in the same rhythm over and over: Mike falls asleep, has the dream, jolts awake, then goes to a local cop (Elizabeth Lail) whose dialogue is mostly exposition. The whole thing loses momentum fast.



Josh Hutcherson does a lot of the heavy lifting as Mike. It’s strange and interesting seeing him here after *The Hunger Games*. He carries himself like somebody ground down by grief and awful jobs. The slump, the permanent tired scowl, the bruised-looking eyes—it all helps sell the exhaustion. He gives the family-drama material more texture than it probably deserves.

And then Matthew Lillard shows up. Because Lillard is Lillard, he instantly jolts the movie awake. Casting him after *Scream* already feels like a wink. As Steve Raglan, the shady career counselor who hands Mike the job, he brings a twitchy, manic charge that the rest of the film badly needs. Even his line readings sound like he’s having more fun than anyone else on set. (There’s a bit where he wipes a knife in a way that perfectly echoes his famous *Scream* gesture—homage or muscle memory, either way it’s one of the few moments the film feels truly alive.)



But a couple of good performances can’t rescue a script that keeps refusing its own genre. *The Guardian*'s Benjamin Lee was dead right to call it a film "unravelling a mystery that's as predictable as it is uninteresting." The PG-13 rating doesn’t help. The camera keeps flinching away at the exact instant the horror should land.

So it winds up feeling like a missed chance. *Five Nights at Freddy's* nails the look of the games, sure, but not the panic that made them work. The flashing lights are here. The humming monitors are here. The creepy mechanical whirs are here. The dread, somehow, never clocks in for the night shift.