It’s 3am, and you’re on the nightshift in an old pizza joint which has been abandoned for years but for some reason still needs you as a security guard, writes Tom Dye.
Through the darkness you can hear a slow, stomping footstep, an echoing metronome cutting through the restaurant. Could this be the mystery killer that shut this place down all those years ago?
Maybe, but unfortunately, you can’t go and investigate right now. No, first, you need to fall asleep to try to recovery a buried memory of a traumatic event so that you can try and alter the past and come to terms with your childhood. Got that?
If reading that left you with third-act whiplash, I regret to inform you that this is pretty much the story of Five Nights at Freddy’s from the get-go.
Josh Hutcherson plays Mike Schmidt, a troubled man trying to keep his younger sister (Piper Rubio) in his custody whilst struggling with age-old guilt about his brother’s kidnapping. Whilst Hutcherson can sell you every emotion his character is experiencing, those emotions always seem to be sleepy and upset – feelings that I and the other three people in the theatre were battling too.
Mike’s cartoonishly evil relative (Mary Stuart Masterson) wants custody of his kid sister, so he needs to find work to keep social services at bay. He gets a job at a dilapidated and abandoned pizzeria filled with animatronic mascots – a bit like America’s Chuck E. Cheese, except these ones are deadly and possessed by the ghosts of children that went missing in the restaurant back in the 1980s. As the body count rises, it becomes clear that the old animatronics might be related to Mike’s recurring nightmares.
Five Nights at Freddy’s is spun from the Scott Cawthon game of the same name. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop have done a fantastic job transforming the game’s designs into genuinely creepy costumes that tower over the other performers. Freddy Fazbear and the mascot gang do look stellar.
Ultimately though, director Emma Tammi has made a horror film that is jarringly unscary, you really feel the 109 minute run time. It partners long, strange (but honestly quite well produced) transitions and dream sequences with at best disappointing thriller tension, barely utilising the jumpscare tactic that made its namesake so successful.
From a franchise that delights in keeping its secrets hidden, and loves to tease you with just little titbits, this film really insists on making sure that all nine years’ worth of Easter eggs are shoved down your throat by an animatronic bunny.
The biggest twist in this film is that we, the audience, were Mike Schmidt the whole time, and it was us who’ve been sleepy and upset for the previous couple of hours.
