After years of speculation, the horror film based on the videogame “Five Nights at Freddy’s” has finally been released, under the same name. It became an instant hit, becoming the highest-grossing horror movie of the year with a box office of $227.8 million and a budget of $20 million.
“Five Nights at Freddy’s” tells us the story of Mike Schmidt, a young man who ends up working as a security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, an abandoned children’s pizzeria with four animatronics as the main entertainment: Bonnie, Chica, Foxy and the main character of the place, Freddy.
The movie closely follows the story of the first videogame, but quickly starts turning into a different perspective of the franchise, changing characters stories such as Vanessa, a cop that appears in the first night of Mike’s shift helping him throughout the movie and Abby, Mike’s sister whom he takes care of.
In the videogames, these two characters in specific have very different backgrounds than the ones shown in the movie, so for extreme fans of the videogames it might be a little off putting to see these names being shown with completely different stories.
The highlight of the movie is William Afton, the iconic villain of the franchise played by actor Matthew Lillard, who does an incredible performance as such a scary and intimidating character, mixing the comedy in early scenes with the total craziness and desperation of the character in the final act.
Mike is shown from early in the movie to have some sort of trauma, via flashbacks and dream sequences that clear up as the movie progresses, showing that the main event that causes these thoughts are the kidnapping of his younger brother.
This backstory ends up being used as a crutch to connect more deeply our main character and the main event in the movie, being the killings of five kids in Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza committed by William Afton. During these killings, he hides the bodies of these kids in the famous four animatronics plus another one hidden from everyone known as Golden Freddy.
In theory, this sounds like a great plan for the movie to position itself, but one of the main mistakes made is that the movie feels as if they can’t decide a tone, and if they do, they do not fully commit to it. The movie is not nearly as scary as it should be to be considered a horror movie, and in the comedy side it doesn’t fulfill that genre either.
The movie has potential to it, with some scenes (mostly with the animatronics or William Afton) that do feel as if they are taking a right path as an adaptation of the videogame, but these scenes are drowned by other sequences which may be considered boring or out of place. At the end of the day, even if the movie has many plot holes and many issues considering the pacing and intensity of the scenes, it is still an extremely fun watch for the fans of the videogames as seeing everything shown in a small indie game be moved to a large Hollywood screen feels as a childhood dream come true.
Five Night at Freddy’s, released on the 27th of October in 2023, is still being shown in many theaters across the country and in the streaming service Peacock.
