Jim Henson’s Creature Shop has built a band of superb animatronics, and Emma Tammi’s film keeps them on the stage while Josh Hutcherson has bad dreams in another room. Worth a look for the puppets; not much of a horror film.
Scott Cawthon’s games are about sitting in a chair. You are the night watchman at a shut-down family restaurant, you have a bank of security monitors and a door that will not hold forever, and something in a bear costume is coming down the corridor. Emma Tammi’s film, written with Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback, decides that this is not enough for 110 minutes, and adds a custody fight, a brother who vanished when Mike was a boy, and a dream Mike keeps going back to in the hope it will tell him who took him. The result is a horror film that keeps leaving the room where the horror is.
What is in that room is worth seeing. The animatronics were built by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and they are proper puppets, with worn fur, scuffed plastic teeth and eyes that catch the light a beat after the head has turned. Marc Fisichella’s pizzeria is a real place: stained carpet, a ball pit nobody has drained, arcade cabinets under dust sheets, a stage with the curtain half drawn. Lyn Moncrief lights it from the monitors and the green exit signs and leaves the band standing in shadow at the back of the frame for long stretches. We sat up the first time Freddy’s head came round, because it plainly weighed something and the turn took as long as it should.
Then we waited for the film to do anything with him, and we waited for most of the remaining hour and a half. Tammi cuts away from the creatures as if she has borrowed them and is worried about the deposit. The violence lands on passing strangers, mostly off screen, and the band spends far more of the film standing still than stalking anyone. The certificate here is a 15, which is more than the film needs. It is not the censor holding it back.
Josh Hutcherson carries it further than the script deserves. He plays Mike as a man who has not slept properly in years, slow to speak and quick to apologise, and he makes the scenes with his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) the warmest thing on offer. Rubio is good at the kitchen table, drawing pictures and refusing to explain them. Matthew Lillard turns up as the careers adviser who sends Mike to Freddy’s and has more fun in five minutes than anyone else manages in two hours. Elizabeth Lail’s police officer Vanessa is handed most of the exposition and delivers it standing in doorways. Mary Stuart Masterson’s Aunt Jane is a cartoon, and not a funny one.
The script is the trouble. Mike takes pills so he can dream, and William Paley and Andrew Wesman cut back to the same sunlit field so often that we began to dread it for the wrong reasons. Every return adds one detail and costs four minutes. The backstory, when it comes, arrives in speeches. Four composers are credited, Ilija Grkocski, Saun Santipreecha, Andrew Grush and Taylor Stewart, and between them they have produced a low hum we could not have described to you ten minutes after the credits. Natalie O’Brien’s costumes at least know what decade the restaurant died in.
Jason Blum produces, and his better small horrors, Get Out among them, understood that one location and one rule will carry a film if you are strict about both. Cawthon’s own games knew it too: you cannot leave the office. Here Mike can leave whenever he likes, and does, driving home in daylight to argue with his aunt while the best puppets in the film wait for him to come back. We were bored for long stretches, and then puzzled that anyone with those robots in the building could have let us be.
Most critics have landed on the same shrug, and we are with them. If you have played the games, or live with someone who has, there is an evening in spotting the posters and the props and hearing the band finally get down off the stage. If you have not, you will be watching a tired man not get eaten for 110 minutes, in a film rated 15 and built for people who are eleven.
