TL;DR – It captures the feel of the video games, though the added narrative might not work for everyone.

Post-Credit Scene – There is a mid-credit scene.

Disclosure – I was invited to a press screening of this film.

Five Nights at Freddy’s Review –

In the not-so-distant past, if you heard the words ‘video game adaptation’, it would provoke a feeling of instant cringe. At best, they were okay, often terrible, and much of the time, they were embarrassed about the very material they were adapting. But 2023 has bucked that trend with The Last of Us and Gran Turismo, some of the many knocking it out of the park. Well, it is time to see if they can keep this run going and terrify me simultaneously.   

So to set the scene, we open in on a man (Ryan Reinike) in clear distress as he crawls through some vents, desperate to escape, but no exit can be found. Sometime later, Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) is desperately looking for a new job after mistaking a father grabbing his kid for a predator. If he can’t get a job, he will lose custody of his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) to their awful Aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson). With very few options left, he takes a security gig at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. It was once all the rage but has sat chiefly abandoned since the 1980s. All Mike must do is sit in the security room and keep an eye on the place, but no one told him the place might be keeping an eye on him.

As someone old enough to have played that game when it came out, I was interested to see how it would translate to the big screen. Well, the answer was pretty good. The slow walk into the building as the lights flickered above was a perfect compliment to the vibe of the original game, even before they walked into the security office. This works with all the hints in the background, the moving shadows, the glitch with the electrics, and the security cameras that show everything and nothing. 

The production of this film is quite faithful to the original. It is a long time before we see the puppets in all their glory/gory, and they do not disappoint. They are terrifying, yet you could still see how kids would love them back in the day. Those animatronics with the performances are what helps the film work as well as it does, and they should be championed for that. But when you call on Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, you know there will be excellent work in your future. This is a very PG-13 film regarding horror, but I didn’t mind that, I don’t need to see the gore for the horror to work for me.

Because this is a film and not a video game, you need there to be a narrative to stitch together the many “don’t get killed by the monsters” scenes together. As this is probably the most significant departure from the original game, it is also the part of the film that you may not connect with. Overall, I thought Josh Hutcherson did a good job of exploring someone who is constantly self-torturing himself over a mistake he made as a child. I liked Piper Rubio as Abby; they end up being the connecting glue for all the different stories, and it works. Now, there are a lot of big reveals, and maybe only one of them works. It starts to lose its way in the second act, but it always flicks back to the horror when needed.  

In the end, do we recommend Five Nights at Freddy’s? Yes, we would. Look, it is not a revolutionary film by any stretch of the imagination, but it understands the game, and what made it work, and better still, it made me jump on many occasions. If you like Five Nights at Freddy’s, we would recommend M3GAN.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Five Nights at Freddy’s
Directed by – Emma Tammi
Screenplay by – Scott Cawthon, Seth Cuddeback & Emma Tammi
Story by – Scott Cawthon, Chris Lee Hill & Tyler MacIntyre
Based on – Five Nights at Freddy’s by Scott Cawthon
Music by – The Newton Brothers
Cinematography by – Lyn Moncrief
Edited by – Andrew Wesman & William Paley
Production/Distribution Companies – Blumhouse Productions, Scott Cawthon Productions, Striker Entertainment & Universal Pictures.
Starring – Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Matthew Lillard, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kat Conner Sterling & Lucas Grant with Grant Feely, Asher Colton Spence, David Huston Doty, Liam Hendrix, Jophielle Love, Christian Stokes, Bailey Winston, Theodus Crane, Ryan Reinike, Kevin Foster, Artie Esposito, Russ Walko, Sarah Sarang Oh, Amanda Maddock & Brett O’Quinn
Rating – Australia: M; Canada: 14A; Germany: 16; New Zealand: M; United Kingdom: 15; United States: PG-13