Home Five Nights At Freddy’s

Five Nights At Freddy's (15)

Cast: Kat Conner Sterling, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Josh Hutcherson, Matthew Lillard
Genre: Horror
Author(s): Emma Tammi, Seth Cuddeback, Scott Cawthon
Director: Emma Tammi
Release Date: 25/10/2023
Running Time: 109mins
Country: US
Year: 2023

Mike Schmidt accepts a position as night-time security guard at the abandoned Freddy Fazbear's Pizza entertainment centre, where families used to flock in their droves in the 1980s. He is desperate to earn money to keep a roof over the head of his younger sister Abby. Local police officer Vanessa visits the building during Mike's first shift to distil the building's grim history. Rumours persist that the animatronics come to life after midnight.


LondonNet Film Review

Five Nights At Freddy’s (15) Film Review from LondonNet

Oversized animatronic animals treat cold-blooded murder as child’s play in a ghoulish thriller directed by Emma Tammi, based on an expansive series of horror-themed video games created by Scott Cawthon. The Five Nights At Freddy’s games cast the player as a night-time security guard at a pizza restaurant overrun by homicidal mechanised critters and each fight for survival typically ends with a jump scare to indicate one of the anthropomorphic menaces has completed a sneak attack. Fans of the interactive bloodbaths will plug narrative gaps in a script co-written by Tammi, Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback, which slavishly mines the games’ chilling lore but scrimps on emotional substance and shocks…

A protracted whodunnit involving child murders and spectral possession has an obvious outcome and lead actor Josh Hutcherson deserves a stronger character arc as reward for his on-screen athleticism to outrun a tragic childhood. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop melds cuteness and menace in fully realised animatronic characters that play a pivotal role in the restrained, sporadic slaughter (the most gruesome death is captured as shadows projected on a wall).

More than a decade after the unsolved kidnap of his younger brother, Mike Schmidt (Hutcherson) takes prescription sleeping pills each night to revisit memories of the disappearance and hopefully recall the hooded abductor’s face. He is sole guardian of a precocious 10-year-old sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), and fiercely rejects attempts by his conniving aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) to overturn the custody order. Mike must work to disprove Jane’s assertion that he isn’t fit to care for Abby. He accepts a thankless position as night-time security guard at the abandoned Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza entertainment centre. “Just keep your eyes on the monitors and keep people out. Piece of cake,” grins his career counsellor (Matthew Lillard).

Local police officer Vanessa Shelly (Elizabeth Lail) visits Mike at the centre to distil the grim history. Children went missing back in the 1980s and were never found, and Freddy’s was shut down. Rumours persist that the centre’s hulking animatronic mascots, Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie the bunny, Chica the chicken and Foxy the pirate fox, come alive after dark, possessed by ghosts of the lost tykes. When babysitter Max (Kat Conner Sterling) is indisposed, Mike is forced to take Abby with him to work and unknowingly places them both in grave danger.

Five Nights At Freddy’s is skin and bones horror, which stretches a flimsy plot to the point of translucency over skeletal remains of a conventional ghost story. Tammi orchestrates solid set pieces with impressive animatronics and repeats a torture sequence involving a Saw-style whirring face mask. If Tammi’s film was a pizza served in Freddy’s heyday, it would be meagre toppings spread thinly on a stodgy base.

– Kim Hu


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