Photo: Ryan Green/Universal Pictures
Trauma. They made it all about trauma. Even more than it was the last time. If the first Five Nights at Freddy’s played like a clunky attempt to introduce youngish kids to the cadences of horror, then its sequel plays like a clunky attempt to introduce now slightly olderish kids to the clichés of horror. And so, to the endless list of modern genre films about trauma, we must now add Five Nights at Freddy’s 2. It makes some kind of demented sense: Isn’t the point of these films to imitate all the other scary movies out there?
Still, these Five Nights at Freddy’s films, based as they are on the extremely popular video-game series, present a true tonal challenge. You can’t go all gonzo-savage horror with them, but you can’t get too lighthearted or goofy either; their stone-faced seriousness is part of the adulting ritual that defines these pictures. Yes, they’re movies about giant animatronic animals in an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese–style pizza parlor coming to life, but they’re dark, gritty movies about giant animatronic animals in an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese–style pizza parlor coming to life.
This one starts with the grisly stabbing murder of a young girl in 1982 at the original Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza franchise, a different and far more extravagant outlet than the one the first movie was about. The film then flashes forward 20 years to pick up our heroes from the previous entry: young Abby Schmidt (Piper Rubio) and her grown-up older brother, Mike (Josh Hutcherson), who, along with Vanessa Shelly (Elizabeth Lail), are still trying to deal with the horrific events of the last film. Vanessa is having visions of being pursued by her dead serial-killer father, William Afton (Matthew Lillard), while Abby still wishes she could go back and hang out with her animatronic friends, who had been possessed by the souls of the children Afton killed.
Abandoned pizza parlors, lonely houses full of sinister ghosts, perpetual darkness, and a stripped-down cast of characters — it’s a bleak, lonely world these movies take place in, which is initially promising. Director Emma Tammi, returning from the first film, keeps things appropriately grim, but there isn’t much here in the way of atmosphere. The haunted pizza parlors aren’t spaces for exploration or visual invention. They’re just convenient dimly lit backdrops for bloodless grotesquerie and a couple of inoffensive jump scares. (This new film brings out the Marionette, a tall, reedy, creepy, evil puppet with a big, round balloon cry face, who is unnerving simply to look at.) But the trauma theme, much discussed by the characters, doesn’t really get any kind of aesthetic workout. Even the film’s central idea of a child communing with giant, surreal automatons — such a eerily resonant image, recalling James Whale’s original Frankenstein — is ultimately a nonstarter. It’s just a thing that happens.
Because it’s darker and a bit more intense, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a slight improvement over the first film, which seemed to mistake family-friendly restraint for abject lifelessness. (Somebody, please rerelease Poltergeist.) But this movie is also more confused than the earlier entry, presenting us with new rules for the workings of this universe while not even trying to mask its clunky plot devices. Even some of its more intriguing plot points fall flat. Obsessed with robotics, Abby is supposed to participate in a school science fair, and we might briefly anticipate the notion of a children’s science fair chaotically overtaken by giant murderous animatronic animals, Joe Dante–style. Don’t get too excited — it’s all handled in the most boring way imaginable.
Still, the first Five Nights at Freddy’s was a huge hit, and this new one might be, too. Watching it at my local multiplex with a room full of young devotees of the video game, I was kind of moved — not by the movie, but by the audience. These kids knew these characters, and they cheered and laughed at all sorts of things that flew over my head. They were having a good time, and it’s hard not to feel happy about that. But it’s also hard not to feel that they deserve better.
