Wandering around a derelict boat tunnel in yet another abandoned location of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, hapless ex-security guard Mike (Josh Hutcherson) seems more like hapless actor Josh Hutcherson straining to understand what’s needed from him in the scene. “Are the ghost kids here?” he asks. He is lost and confused, adrift in a franchise drowning in lore, more paralyzed than paranormal. Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 mires the slow, scareless first film deeper in the backstory ephemera of the video game series—whatever crass simplicity there once was to the concept of “Chuck E. Cheese that kills you,” it has been crushed to death by narrative add-ons, plot gimmicks, and heavy-duty incompetence. The worst part is that, in the world imagined by series creator Scott Cawthon, death isn’t even the merciful end.
Cawthon, the sole writer of the film’s oops-all-cliffhangers screenplay, bears far more guilt for this world than returning director Emma Tammi. Tammi may not be able to make murderous, sharp-toothed robot animals scary, or clearly explore a space, or coax performers into finding something human to tap into, but it’s Cawthon’s games where, in the cracks of a simple repeated loop—sitting at a desk keeping killer animatronics at bay until they inevitably jump-scare you—drips and drabs of convoluted mystery spill out. Parsing the dense details of the story, endlessly consuming YouTube explainers, is what this series is all about. And Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 replicates the experience: It’s like watching a table read of a Fandom wiki, cut off mid-article.
The original film at least eventually cleared things up by the end of its sedate slasher: It’s not that the mechanical creations are evil down to their screws, but that they’re haunted, housing the souls of murdered children who just want to go to heaven. (Cawthon, before he struck gold with a franchise that would become a horror-by-proxy sensation thanks to hammy live-streams, was a prolific creator of Christian movies and games.) Those kids took their revenge already, eye-for-an-eyeing baddie William (Matthew Lillard) at the end of the last movie. So, all square, right?
Apparently not—and not only because Mike’s kid sister Abby (Piper Rubio) misses her “ghost kids trapped inside an animatronic purgatory” pals. Aside from that ridiculous motivation, there’s also a new ghost kid and a new corresponding animatronic (a marionette that looks like Spirited Away‘s No-Face overindulged on Ozempic) and some new contrived reasons for everyone to go back to a pair of pizza places that have been confirmed to be extremely haunted. Yet, the sequel is caught between clichés. Should it repeat itself at another pizza place, or turn the monsters loose from their lair? It opts for both: This new villain, which possesses a Ghost Hunters-like host (Mckenna Grace) so quickly she may as well not even be in the movie, helps free the animatronics from their pizzeria confines. The band is on tour.
Or, at least, they could go on tour. Freddy the bear, Chica the bird, Bonnie the bunny, and Foxy the, well… you get it—they all just slowly, separately, non-threateningly plod around. A few antagonize random families, others harass Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), the cop daughter of William. Chica goes to Abby’s science fair, Freddy hangs out at a self-congratulatory local festival all about Five Nights At Freddy’s. Whatever tension was derived from the stationary, claustrophobic setting of the games has vanished in the sprawling sequel.
The meandering lethargy of Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 has the energy of a full movie constructed from those boring scenes where the final girl goes to the library to do research. Tammi is still unable to stage a horror set piece or even an effective shock. Lit, paced, and cut like an actual commercial for a pizza place, the film gives little indication that it understands it’s a horror film until someone kicks the bucket. But few sequences end with dead bodies; all end with dead air. This leaves the various bright and shiny creations of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop to whir and stomp around listlessly. Rather than these being the film’s point of visual pride, Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 instead obsesses over game props and Easter eggs. Its own characters quickly undermine these, ashamed of the silliness that spawned them.
“What idiot designed this?” Mike asks himself, the film pausing for its audience to knowingly chuckle. “This dumb thing is from the game, Mike,” they all are supposed to think in unison. “It’s dumb in a way we recognize and therefore enjoy.” Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 spends so much time on set-ups like these that a majority of its 104 minutes seem to be those pauses. In fact, its entire third act is just expectation for a third movie that hopefully never comes. It is a bare minimum branding experiment, a dumb thing designed to be recognized with the hope that enjoyment will simply follow.
Director: Emma Tammi
Writer: Scott Cawthon
Starring: Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Freddy Carter, Theodus Crane, Wayne Knight, Teo Briones, Mckenna Grace, Skeet Ulrich, Matthew Lillard
Release Date: December 5, 2025
