Haunted by a childhood trauma he has never overcome, Mike goes from one temporary job to another, encountering recurring behavioral problems. After being unemployed again and therefore risking losing custody of his little sister Abi, he finds himself forced to accept a position as a night security guard in a pizzeria, closed to the public since the 1980s, called Freddy Fazbear. At night Mike has strange dreams, connected in some way to the bizarre animatronic puppets that characterize the place and which seem to hide lethal secrets.
The adaptation of a very popular video game, which sees the involvement of the creator Scott Cawthon among the screenwriters, translates into an old-fashioned slasher, with a supernatural secret to reveal and a succession of brutal murders to interrupt.
Much of the success of the Five Nights at Freddy’s game is due to the vintage reference to the 80s, perpetually evoked on a phantasmatic level by the sinister venue, in which it seems that time has stopped. It seemed that Chris Columbus was going to direct the film, before the helm passed to the less glamorous signature of Emma Tammi (The Wind).
The reworks of the script are evident and make the development uneven: the first part seems to build around Abi’s foster care a potential clash between Mike’s aunt, cynical and greedy to the point of perpetrating criminal acts, and the protagonist, a candid soul underneath the blanket of evident instability. But none of this is developed significantly by Tammi, who abandons the narrative threads to themselves to converge towards a decisive epilogue.
The aim of the screenplay seems to be to take us inside the cursed pizzeria as soon as possible, where we can recreate the suspense of the video game. The animatronics are well made and disturbing, but their terrifying potential is defused by a direction careful to show as little blood as possible and leave the brutal killings off-screen, perhaps in the hope of appealing to a wider audience and avoiding the feared “R” rating of the censorship commission (which for a horror film is more of a guarantee than a deterrent). The lack of involvement in watching the film is equal to that of the actors in interpreting it.