After the runaway success of 2023’s Five Nights at Freddy’s, a sequel was inevitable. And here it is: most of the original cast and crew back on board, trying to conjure the same frights, though at times it feels less like a film and more like an endless string of cutscenes you’d be tempted to skip by mashing the X button.
Eager to capitalise on its predecessor, the sequel mostly retraces familiar ground. The main novelty: the animatronic terrors are finally unleashed beyond their Chuck E. Cheese–adjacent lair and into the wider world – an idea the recent Tron sequel also tried, with similarly clumsy results. The film also expands Vanessa’s backstory, opening with a 1982 prologue that introduces a new mechanical menace, Marionette.
The narrative picks up a year after the chaos at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, by which time the events have been twisted into a kitsch local legend, inspiring the town’s first-ever ‘Fazfest’. Mike (Josh Hutcherson) and Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) have kept Mike’s 11-year-old sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), in the dark about what really happened to her animatronic companions. When Abby sneaks out to reconnect with Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy, long-buried secrets about the restaurant’s origins come to light, and an old threat is reawakened.
The lead cast do their best — particularly Hutcherson, Rubio, and Lail — but the script, a patchwork of half-formed schemes for scares and jolts, leaves them little room to breathe. Solid on their own, their performances are ultimately boxed in by a story that can’t decide what it wants to be.
Emma Tammi, who helmed the first Freddy’s, returns for this second outing, one of the few elements lending the film any sense of stylistic continuity. Yet for a franchise rooted in horror, the results are surprisingly tame. A handful of grisly moments aside, there’s little here that genuinely unsettles; most of the so-called scares come courtesy of the volume knob, with Tammi relying on sudden audio jolts that feel more mechanical than menacing.
Die-hard Five Nights at Freddy’s players will likely be the film’s most enthusiastic audience, as Scott Cawthon’s script is once again packed with nods and references. For everyone else, these references will register as little more than background noise, meaningful to devotees but completely irrelevant to newcomers.
Matthew Lillard returns – a move telegraphed ever so early on, making his appearance as unsurprising as his reveal as the first film’s antagonist. This time around, Lillard appears only in one brief nightmare scene, and Skeet Ulrich, supposedly reprising his connection to the original Scream, shows up for an even shorter cameo as a dishevelled, mourning father. You can’t help wondering why they didn’t let the two of them share a scene. A small wink to fans would have broken up the otherwise very by-the-numbers proceedings.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 unfolds as a succession of painting-by-numbers scares—serviceable in a video game, but terrifyingly hollow on the big screen. The few grisly moments aside, there is little here that genuinely unsettles, and the story never finds its rhythm. By the time the credits roll, a third instalment is teased, leaving the audience with the clear and unsettling message that these animatronics have no intention of clocking off any time soon. There really is no escaping this “labyrinth of sounds and smells, misdirection and misfortune.”
VERDICT
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 stalks into cinemas on December 5.
