Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 39 minutes
Director: Emma Tammi
Quick Impressions:
Without a doubt, the strongest part of our Five Nights at Freddy’s experience was the trailer for Dream Scenario, a film in which a random guy, played by Nicholas Cage starts showing up in the backgrounds of people’s dreams all over the world.
“We’ve got to see that!” my daughter gasped to me.
She’s right! We must go!
Five Nights at Freddy’s was a must-see for our family, too. My eight-year-old is continuously trying to educate me on the nuances that distinguish “liminal spaces” from “weird core” and “kid core.” So far I’ve not been a great student, and frankly, I’m beginning to want to see his sources for myself. At some point, though, Five Nights at Freddy’s shows up in all these conversations (just like Nicholas Cage shows up in all those strangers’ dreams! No kidding, we gotta see that!).
Our kids got a (really surprising) five-day weekend for Halloween, so I thought, “Let’s make this happen!” (They showed a trailer for the Mean Girls musical, too! That trailer package was all over the place (just like Nicholas Cage in those people’s dreams!!!!))
“Everybody has seen Five Nights at Freddy’s by now but me!” my daughter kept lamenting. And my son makes Freddy Fazbear jokes all the time. From the way they were carrying on, I expected to show up to a sold-out auditorium with concessions lines a mile long.
Then we were the only people in the theater, not just in the auditorium but in the lobby. There was no concessions line. The employee started taking our order immediately, so I panicked and tried the Fanta Mystery Flavor Icee. (If you’re curious, it tastes like a mixture of Sweet Tarts, Oranges, and Pickles, and it turned my daughter’s tongue black but not mine.)
We were in the biggest auditorium, the XD screen of a Cinemark theater. Just before the movie started, one other group of people entered. It felt like a private screening. My daughter kept whispering to me. She has thoughts galore about the execution of this film.
The Good:
Five Nights at Freddy’s gets an A plus for atmosphere (early on, at least). Unlike my children, I have never played the games, though, of course, I’m familiar with the franchise (ubiquitous on YouTube if the content creators my kids watch are any indicator). (Someone should make a movie of that game Kindergarten. There’s also one called Little Misfortune that would make a fantastic film. It practically is a film already.)
As a kid, I loved ShowBiz Pizza. Both my mother and I ardently preferred it to Chuck E. Cheese. Even as an adult, I find it pretty fun to play skee-ball in the dark in a room that smells vaguely of pizza and sweat. I can scratch that itch at GattiTown now, but the movie room pales in comparison to that creepy animatronic floor show. I loved watching the strange songs played by Billy Bob and Friends. I’m a lifelong lover of metadrama, and that show isn’t just weird in retrospect. It was always weird, even while you were participating in it. At least, it always made me feel a little bit like I was one of the robots, putting on the show of Child’s Birthday Party. (And so often, when lighting a cake, I quietly sing, “You’re the birthday, you’re the birthday, you’re the birthday boy or girl,” like in that great Simpsons bit.)
My dad was in the hotel business, so we’d attend banquets, holiday buffets, company parties. It made sense to me that those things were rituals of his world, and Billy Bob and his friends performing at ShowBiz Pizza was a ritual of mine.
So I’m thoroughly drawn in and easily won over by the concept. (“Look how weird the 80s was!”) All the ways kids had fun in the 80s—roller rinks, McDonald’s birthday parties, wearing leg warmers—were even recognized at the time as being of the moment and culturally our own. So it’s great to watch these moments of yesteryear come back in pop culture horror. That’s very enjoyable. (I mean, what kid didn’t pretend things like, “I was at the mall, and I got locked in at night”?) I enjoy seeing these haunting revisionist re-visitations of what we did as children. I love that stuff.
At first, the movie really appealed to me because it’s weirdly self-aware. The protagonist believes that everything is stored in his memory somewhere, and he just has to learn to access it, so he’s trying to relive the same crucial moment every night in his dreams. So he’s all of us. He wants to revisit the scene of his brother’s kidnapping and change the outcome, and we want to revisit ShowBiz Pizza and make it creepier. I like the concept.
Early on, the movie does a wonderful job building this creepy atmosphere and drawing us into it. Yes, it’s a little cheesy, but if you go with it, the movie leads you on this pleasant little horrible adventure. The protagonist’s obsession with dreaming and inability to let go of the past is something I relate to very strongly. I often get overwhelmed in the moment. Then it takes me thirty years to figure out what happened. By the time I know what was going on, the event has already been over for a decade.
The movie also has a sound, edifying moral. You cannot live in the past. Let go of the past. Do not neglect the present trying futilely to fix your past. Focus on what is happening right now. This is excellent, practical advice and in total conflict with my every instinct. (For me, a major source of conflict emerges when I am attempting to write about the past. I’m doing the writing in the present, so that’s what I am doing now. And yet to focus on the present, I have to focus on the past because that’s what I’m writing about. I’m not sure writing about the past is good for my mental health, honestly.)
That said, this film has a lot of flaws. It’s not what most people would call a good movie. It does have good elements. But as a writer, it’s hard not to watch it and see the potential for a better movie. (That sounds so pretentious. I haven’t made any movies!) My daughter was livid through most of it. As someone who actually knows the games, she thought the film creates unnecessary novel plotlines when it could have stuck with the plot of the game (though that’s complicated by the fact that users may have generated much of that plot, not the game developers).
As long as Five Nights at Freddy’s decides to be a gentle, atmospheric horror movie, it’s a pretty good watch. When it strays from this, though, it’s still decent to watch, but it loses its greatest strength (the spooky mood), and it becomes a much worse film that doesn’t quite make sense.
The actors make it work, though (sort of). I love Josh Hutcherson. I’ve always liked him since he was a child starring in every kids’ movie out there. (I feel like we took our oldest son to see them all. During the opening credits I suddenly remembered Firehouse Dog for the first time in over a decade.) Hutcherson is a good actor. If anything, he’s too good an actor here.
On the way home, my husband asked us, “Did it seem to you like the movie had actors beyond the material?” I knew immediately what he meant. In so many scenes, Hutcherson comes across like he’s starring in a gritty indie thriller, the psychological study of a man tormented by a past mistake. (As I think about it, that type of character shows up in a lot of 80s action movies.)
Mary Stuart Masterson, though, seems like she’s the villain in a campy soap opera. She’s good, too, ruthless charisma, comic undertone, over-the-top, inexplicable villainy. Matthew Lillard gives a good performance, too, acting just exactly as you would expect. Meanwhile Elizabeth Lail as Vanessa is in a romantic comedy about a cop who destroys evidence. (I know that’s not a common genre.) Kat Conner Sterling as Max is in a grim, depressing crime drama. They’re all giving good performances and are highly watchable, even though at times it’s hard to believe they’re all in the same movie.
The special effects are amazing, though, particularly because I didn’t even consider that the film had special effects until now. I just believed what it showed me, kind of like when I saw Gravity and accepted that Sandra Bullock was in space. As I watched Gravity, I forgot people don’t film movies in space. As I watched this, I forgot animatronics don’t just effortlessly walk around on a killing spree. Now I see that Jim Henson’s creature shop built the “animatronic” characters. They’re very well done. It’s odd that some elements of the film seem implausible, but it’s not the animatronic characters themselves that take me out of the story. They’re believable and show a lot of character.
I also enjoyed Lyn Moncrief’s cinematography. I take pictures for fun, and while my knowledge of photographic technique is extremely limited, I’m fascinated by shot composition and found a number of compellingly framed scenes in this film. Five Nights at Freddy’s does an excellent job of subtly distinguishing the three worlds—inside Mike’s dreams, inside Freddy’s, and outside in present reality. We’re so often cued by slight changes in color and lighting. These separate spaces seem different in a way you feel before consciously seeing. Sound also builds atmosphere here. Distinct, unusual noises help us feel where we are.
Best Scene:
Even though I find the subplot problematic and the tone confusing, I just love that scene in the diner when the villainous group sits scheming but refuses to order anything. Mary Stuart Masterson is so affronted by the very idea that the waiter would expect them to order! What nerve! They just come there to plot their schemes obviously! Hasn’t that waiter seen any movies or TV shows? Diner booths are the best place to plot seedy, ill-conceived crimes! And Kat Conner Sterling’s Max has such dark eyeliner on and looks so conflicted and regretful. The waiter ought to recognize what’s happening!
Best Scene Visually:
Anyone who has ever been a child should love that scene in the ball pit. Those ball pits were the best. They were such a fixture of my childhood, and the way this scene is presented allows viewers to imagine they’ve dived into that ball pit themselves and are hiding in there. Ball pits are such a pre-pandemic luxury. In the future, will anyone understand why pits of garishly colored plastic balls were so wildly popular, especially when they might be secretly concealing any number of gross child excretions? They’re far more fun than they ought to be. Plenty of TV shows and movies feature ball pits, but this one reminds you of the experience of diving into one and hiding down there.
Best Action Sequence:
I love Mike’s dreams. Part of that’s driven by my enduring fascination with ghosts. But I like the frequent shots up into the trees, and the way we feel so desperate along with him. He’s trapped, but he’s surrounded by so much open space. And Josh Hutcherson could be performing Hamlet. Put a different genre of film around him, and he’d be winning an Oscar for these scenes, I’m sure. (Or at least he’d die trying.)
The moment shown on closed-circuit camera monitors featuring Christian Stokes running screaming through the entire restaurant is strangely enjoyable, too. It reminds me of that one scene in You Were Never Really There (where Joaquin Phoenix is systematically moving from room to room attacking everyone with a hammer). There is a comedy buried somewhere in this movie.
The Negatives:
I really liked this movie, I’m realizing. The more I think about it, the more I appreciate the visual storytelling and careful atmosphere building. Visually it’s quite strong. The eerie restaurant looks great!
I just want it to have a completely different plot. My daughter does, too. She’s furious that the movie doesn’t give us the game’s original story as the plot (though she concedes that some of this story was fan-generated, though apparently later incorporated into the series by the developers). I suppose you wouldn’t want to go the simple route of setting the main story in the 1980s since you’d lose the franchise’s trademark liminal space aspect if the pizza place were up and running.
I do like the film’s atmospheric distinction between the various spaces the characters inhabit. What doesn’t quite work is its attempt to incorporate comedic elements. Surely Mary Stuart Masterson is trying to be kind of funny. I like the way she plays the character, but the movie lets her down. I kept feeling like a joke was dancing around and never quite landing. There’s inherent humor in the premise. The secret Mike initially discovers about Freddy’s is so off-the-wall (if you step back and consider it). And I suppose that’s mirrored by the evil plot in the diner scene (when they refuse to order). There’s a ludicrousness about most of the things that happen. A late scene in a taxi clearly wants to be funny. It falls flat, though.
Plenty of movies mix horror and comedy. This film has the opportunity to be tongue-in-cheek. Surely it’s designed to appeal to adolescents who love ironically enjoying things. But it can’t quite decide how it wants that element of humor to work with the seriousness of the horror plot. So in the moments when we’re not feeling eerie, we don’t quite know how to react. Five Nights at Freddy’s seems like an ideal film to mock. I could imagine Austin’s Master Pancake Theater greatly improving the viewing experience. The suggestion of humor is rife, but the movie refuses to make the joke for us.
Maybe if I had seen it in a full auditorium with others laughing, it would have worked better for me. Maybe, too, I’m missing jokes specifically included for fans well-versed in the games. (Max’s insistence that Mike really does sleep a lot could be a joke like that. Does the security guard fall asleep way too often in the game? Is that why in the movie he’s taking sleeping pills round the clock, obsessed with dreaming? I’ve never played the game.)
About a third of the way through, both the eerie mood and the plot itself begin to break down. Themovie’s middle section is particularly clunky. Vanessa and Mike keep having frustrating circular arguments that don’t quite make sense.
Another problem is the villain’s identity is obvious from the opening credits. There are limited possibilities, and by the time we’ve seen the first fifteen minutes of the movie, we know. There’s another character who could be a plausible red herring villain. I think that person should be made to look like more of a real candidate for villain. (But maybe the movie is trying to do that.) As a film, this would work better if we weren’t entirely sure who was responsible for all the evil over at the pizza place. Of course, that person’s name is known in game lore. Changing the character too much would be a needless departure from the game. (My daughter is already mad about how much they did change.) But the protagonist does not even realize he’s caught in an eerie echo of his primal trauma because he’s too busy reliving that earlier trauma. Somebody took his brother. More than one person is trying to take his sister. More could be done with this. As the viewer, you have to connect all the dots yourself and make up a bunch of theories, drawing your own parallels. Maybe that replicates the experience of playing the game with all its fan-generated theories, but as a cinematic experience, it feels frustrating.
From the flip phones, I’m guessing this takes place around the turn of the Millennium, so maybe motives are incidental. But I still think so many characters have motives that are too muddled. (They have stated, long-term goals, but their immediate actions are poorly thought through and executed.) And they’re all terrible communicators. Everything gets vaguer as the story goes along. One major source of conflict is totally eliminated in such an incidental way. And as far as the main villain—I’m not satisfied with this reveal. I want to know more about this person’s motives and methods. I just want more details, especially about what happened to one particular character and why. To be fair, I guess that’s what Mike wants, too. He learns not to focus on this. But the thing is, he gets the opportunity to find these answers in his present, waking life. Wouldn’t pushing a bit harder here be entirely appropriate?
Perhaps the biggest problem is that nothing in the movie makes sense. Why is Freddy’s still around needing to be guarded? Why does no one question this? Why is Aunt Jane willing to take such risks and go to such lengths (undertaking a plan that is so stupid and illogical)? Who is Max? Why does Mike just assume she will keep babysitting all night every night for free? The film itself feels like a dream. We’re expected to take all plot elements as they come, even if they make no sense at all. There’s a strange dream logic to everything. (For example, Mike’s explanation to Vanessa about the pills does not really explain anything about the situation she’s pressing him about. Her willingness to destroy evidence does illustrate her ease with being complicit in crimes, but we don’t understand why he left his pills at work, or why he’s being blamed for a break-in that happened after his shift ended. And who guards the place in the daytime?)
I’m curious about the game now. I love the atmosphere. Maybe the game would give me more of that, and I wouldn’t need to worry so much about plot, motives, and tonal irregularities.
“The movie is about dreams,” I said to my daughter as I picked her up from band practice. “Maybe the movie is a dream. That’s why we just have to accept all the plot elements even when so many of them make no sense.” She wasn’t sold.
My eight-year-old thought the movie was “pretty good.” I must mention, however, that though he technically watched the whole thing, he did not listen to any of it. The whole time, he wore his headphones, listening to the series Warriors read aloud. These days, that’s what he does everywhere we go! His sister’s innumerable marching band events have given him lots of time for audiobooks.
Overall:
I’m developing a fondness for Five Nights at Freddy’s. Its ending clearly leaves the door open for a sequel, but I’d rather see it continue as a TV series. I am curious about the further adventures of Josh Hutcherson and his much younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio). This film at times seems muddled. Not every plot element makes sense. Motivations are left mysterious. And the eerie mood sometimes almost evaporates, replaced by nothing (even though it may be going for comedy). But the film does have its strengths. If you’re a fan of the game franchise, pine for Showbiz Pizza, enjoy liminal spaces, Josh Hutcherson, or meditations on dreams, you’ll want to check this out. My son’s headphones have me wondering–would this work better as a silent movie? Maybe.