It’s a cliche that most stories, at heart, are about trauma. And now that’s even the case with a horror comedy about Chuck E. Cheese-like robotic theme park mascots attacking and killing people. Five Nights at Freddy’s, based on a popular video game series of the same name, is two movies: a troubled young man struggling to come to grips with a horrible childhood tragedy that decimated his family, and the tale of those theme park creatures becoming surprisingly violent. I gather the abuse-oriented material has its roots in the game series, but on screen, those two movies don’t fit together at all. The tones don’t match, and neither do the stakes.
The film, coming out today both in theaters and on the streaming service Peacock, was directed by Emma Tammi, who’s also one of three screenwriters; Scott Cawthon, who created the game, is another. The gimmick, at least at the start, has the potential for a lot of fun. Josh Hutcherson stars as Mike Schmidt, who can’t hold down a job and is tormented by visions of the younger brother who was abducted when he was 12 and never found. He’s currently struggling to care for his much younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio).
However, he risks losing custody to a particularly mean aunt, played by the long-absent 1980s and 90s actress Mary Stuart Masterson, from Some Kind of Wonderful and Chances Are. It’s not clear when the film is set, although the clothes and technology indicate the early-1990s, and Masterson still sports a haircut not too different from back then.
A career counselor (Matthew Lillard) suggests Mike take a job as an overnight security guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, a long-abandoned Chuck E. Cheese knockoff in the middle of nowhere. He discovers that the animatronic mascots appear to have become sentient and are out to kill, and is determined to protect his sister from them. He teams up with Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), seemingly this town’s lone police officer; you’d think the multiple murders would draw more attention from law enforcement.
The first mistake is that a movie about murderous Chuck E. Cheese creatures should be funny, and at the beginning, it is. But Five Nights at Freddy’s, for the most part, is dour and depressing, all about buried traumas and child endangerment in both the past and present. As for the violence, it’s mostly cartoonish, with a large amount of the jump scares with which the game series has long been associated; most of the murders cut away before any blood appears. And the climax is a mess, reliant on every annoying filmmaker’s favorite gimmick, flashing lights.
It’s also one of those movies where we figure out relatively quickly who the final bad guy is, because the movie has no other unaccounted-for characters (Roger Ebert called this the Law of the Economy of Characters). Five Nights at Freddy’s is produced by Blumhouse Media, which used to mean something specific, but now that company is responsible for roughly half the horror movies released each year, so the heft is gone.