110 min | PG-13 | October 27, 2023 | Universal Pictures
Mike Schmidt needs a job and takes the worst one available. He signs on as night guard at an abandoned pizza place where the animatronic mascots get up and walk around after closing. The robots are scarier than anything the script does with them.
Mike Schmidt takes a night security job at a derelict pizza restaurant called Freddy Fazbear’s. The animatronic mascots come alive after dark. They are not friendly. Director Emma Tammi builds the film around a haunted-house premise lifted directly from a video game, and that source loyalty is both the film’s selling point and its central problem. The story wants to be a creepypasta about murdered children and a working-class man drowning in trauma, but it keeps stopping to honor the lore instead of building dread.
Josh Hutcherson plays Mike with a grim, sleep-deprived flatness that fits a man haunted by a childhood kidnapping. He underplays everything, and the restraint reads as the script giving him nothing to do for long stretches. Piper Rubio plays his younger sister Abby with more conviction than the material earns, treating the killer robots as imaginary friends. Matthew Lillard plays career counselor Steve Raglan with a coiled, knowing menace that the film hoards until the final act. Elizabeth Lail plays Officer Vanessa with a watchful unease, and the screenplay strands her in expository scenes that explain the plot rather than complicate it.
Tammi co-writes the script with game creator Scott Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback, and that committee approach shows in a film that protects its mythology at the expense of tension. The animatronics, built as practical puppets by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, are the genuine achievement. They have weight and texture that no rendered monster matches, and the camera lingers on their stiff, lurching movements with real affection. The lighting keeps the pizzeria in warm amber and sickly fluorescent green, which looks great and generates almost no fear. The PG-13 rating sands the violence down to glimpses, so the kills land without consequence.
The film is a delivery system for iconography rather than a horror movie with a pulse. Every scare is staged to confirm what the audience already knows about Freddy and his friends. The most interesting thread, Mike’s grief and his fight to keep custody of Abby, gets buried under franchise housekeeping. Tammi makes a handsome object that mistakes fidelity for storytelling. It honors the game and forgets to frighten anyone who has not already played it.