Last night I finally saw Five Nights At Freddy’s: The Movie Of The Game With Multiple Spin-Offs That Also Has Several Novelizations And Makes Up One-Fifth Of YouTube. It was, at times, inscrutable, and it treated the aphorism “show, don’t tell” like a sworn enemy. Also, none of the characters behaved like human beings – even the ones who were not hulking animatronics possessed by the ghosts of dead children. Oh, and it nearly wasted Matthew Lillard, god’s only perfect son. But it was still kind of charming? Somehow?
For the uninitiated – aka those over 30 – the core conceit of the Five Nights At Freddy’s video game series is a genuinely good horror setup: decrepit animatronics at a Chuck E. Cheese-like restaurant have come to life, and they want to kill you. The movie more or less runs with that, starring Josh Hutcherson as Mike, who is raising his younger sister Abby following the deaths of their parents. Ostensibly to improve Abby's circumstances, he ends up taking a late-night security job at a defunct Charles Entertainment Cheese-y establishment with a “sentimental” owner. There’s a subplot about how Mike’s evil aunt wants to obtain legal custody of his sister through a mixture of farce and force, but mainly it’s about animatronics coming to life and… also trying to steal Mike’s sister.
The movie’s characters make basically no sense. Mike is obsessed with learning the identity of the man who kidnapped his brother when they were kids, to the point that it continues to consume every facet of his life even now that he is seemingly in his late 20s or early 30s. Each night he takes sleeping pills and listens to sounds that remind him of the incident so he can relive it in his dreams, in vain hope that he might catch a glimpse of the man’s face. His personal and professional lives are basically in tatters because of this, as is his relationship with Abby. Abby loves to draw and hates to talk to Mike, which is at least later (sort of) explained by her connection to the ghosts at the heart of the story. Mike and Abby’s aunt is evil. No further explanation offered.
Mike is also not-really aided by a police officer, Vanessa, who spends the whole movie conspicuously showing up – first at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, then at Mike’s home – with immense purpose and almost-zero payoff. Everything about her is baffling. Each line she utters is drenched in “Beg me to tell you more” subtext, and then when Mike asks her to say more, she’s like, “Oh my stars, no, I couldn’t possibly!” Then she leaves, only to later return and ominously warn Mike against whatever course of action he’s taking, at which point Mike – nearly as exasperated as the audience – pleads with her to explain what’s going on. She, in turn, shouts and gesticulates broadly, only to effectively say, “Nah dude, you’ve just gotta trust me.”
Turns out, the movie’s primary antagonist, William Afton, is her father, and he murdered a bunch of kids – including, many years ago, Mike’s brother – for reasons that are never explained. Now the souls of some of those kids – not including Mike’s brother, even though that sure would have made for a compelling character beat – inhabit the animatronics. This mirrors the overarching plot of the games, all the way down to the fact that the villain’s true motivations are not explained until later entries in the game series, either. In movie form, it’s frustratingly opaque, redeemed only by the fact that Lillard plays Afton just weirdly enough: unnervingly upbeat at the movie’s outset and then comically maniacal at the end. I wish they’d have given him more to work with, but Five Nights At Freddy’s nonetheless strengthens my argument that the Oscars should make a bespoke category for Weird Guys and Lillard should take home the first statue. Anyway, the kids want Abby to Come Play With Them Forever And Ever and keep doing murders about it, but also they’re being controlled by Afton somehow, so maybe they aren’t so bad? It never becomes entirely clear.
The animatronics steal the show, largely due to the far-defter-than-I-was-expecting-from-this-movie decision to include several scenes where they aren’t murdering people thanks to their friendship with Abby. There’s one especially inspired bit where Abby, Mike, and Vanessa chill with Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and co, and they all build a blanket fort together. Or at least, they try to; the animatronics end up being a little too tall for the rickety, table-based construction.
They all lay on the cheese-encrusted carpet together in a sweet little circle, staring up at the ceiling. It’s funny! And endearing. But the scene also teeters on a knife’s edge: We’ve watched these things kill before. Heck, they’ve attacked Mike, specifically. They remain, as ever, enormous and menacing. But also, in this moment, it doesn’t seem like they’re gonna suddenly bifurcate anybody? And much of this is communicated more or less wordlessly, unlike literally everything else in the rest of the movie. It rules!
Scenes like this made me long for a movie that spent more time having fun with its premise than trying to hit just enough lore beats to satisfy fans but not enough to actually explain anything. It made me concerned, too, about the future that awaits us as the Hollywood machine prepares to gobble up as many video game properties as it can get its hands on, like so many run-down animal robots piloted by dead children. Who will these movies and TV shows end up being for?
The Last Of Us TV show stayed faithful to its source material to great effect, but the source material was so Hollywood-inspired and cutscene-driven that it was practically a film unto itself. And its third episode, arguably its best, deviated significantly from the games. This year’s Mario movie, on the other hand, included countless fan-pleasing references, but they weren’t really in service of anything. They just sort of existed in an otherwise bland film that served its purpose of luring countless kids (and their parents) to theaters.
The latter, I expect, is more what we’re in for when it comes to adaptations of beloved series like The Legend of Zelda: bland crowd-pleasing fare that fails to really live up to characters’ big-screen potential. That’s a shame, because there is a lot of potential to be tapped here, as Five Nights At Freddy’s – of all things! – demonstrates. But I fear that it’s going to be a long, long time before anybody’s willing to take even slight risks when they’ve got fans to placate and box offices to resuscitate.
