Jonah Naplan   December 6, 2025

“Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” is so bizarre and poorly made that it barely feels like a movie. Its 2023 predecessor was at least somewhat coherent with a strong retro aesthetic and visuals that made you feel like you were experiencing an unholy fusion between the pop culture worlds of now and yore. But this bigger and badder sequel brings virtually nothing to the table and looks and moves as though it was designed for some second tier streaming service, despite being $20 million more expensive than the first movie. Of course, it’s for the fans and, by that logic, is practically critic-proof, but I consider it my civic duty to complain about it nonetheless. Maybe somebody will listen.

Set one year after the first movie, “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” picks up with Abby (Piper Rubio), the little girl who doesn’t have any real friends so she yearns to return to the deranged pizzeria where the quartet of animatronics resides—they’re the only people who truly “understand” her. Her older brother/guardian Mike (Josh Hutcherson) has promised to “fix” them for months and months but hasn’t followed through with it yet. Indeed, he’s been distracted by his complicated relationship with Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), a victim of the first movie’s attacks and also the daughter of the animatronics’ wretched designer William Afton (Matthew Lillard).

Coming off the back of a film that was itself incredibly convoluted, I can’t really identify any singular event that gets the plot of “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” going because it just kind of … starts. Aimlessly and with little flair, returning director Emma Tammi and writer Scott Cawthon focus their sights on the woes of Abby, who’s something of a brainiac but is very socially introverted and keeps getting picked on by her science teacher Mr. Berg (Wayne Knight). The movie is a twisted version of the bildungsroman whereby Abby learns the fundamental importance of family and finding herself and whatnot, while evading capture by a new set of murderous animatronics who hail from the very first Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. It’s just possessed marionette stuff, don’t worry.

There’s also a group of teenage paranormal vloggers, headed by Mckenna Grace, who are investigating the same restaurant, but don’t quite make it out. Even so, they’re barely in the movie, which is sort of surprising considering that Grace is top billed on Google and has become incredibly popular among the demographic that this kind of movie appeals to. “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” is rated PG-13, but not the kind of PG-13 that you can take your seven-year-old to. It wants to be R and, if not for the adolescent fans, probably should have been R. It wants to go the full monty, as evidenced by crude but uninspired sequences of carnage, including one in a storage closet that attempts to give youngsters their first dose of slasher movie wish fulfillment, where the big bully “gets what they deserve,” like in a “Halloween” or “Scream” film.

Moments like these prove there’s nothing remotely original or interesting about “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2,” which telegraphs all the jumpscares from a mile away and is unintentionally laughable when it’s trying to be scary, and insufferably boring when it’s trying to be intriguing. The editing is truly atrocious, even during emotional scenes, such as when Mike and Abby are having a heart-to-heart, or when Vanessa is having a murderous flashback, and the thematics don’t wash because it’s all cut together so bizarrely. On the other hand, the last twenty minutes present one of the strangest, fast-then-slow finales of recent memory, curbed by an ending that’s not really an ending at all, and is instead just the story “cutting off.”

Will fans like it though? Probably. The first movie satisfied them despite my gripes two years ago, and the same will probably happen again here. In fact, I know video game connoisseurs who have already seen it and leaned positive. The only reason I can figure is the fan service, which is unrelenting and even more obnoxious in “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2,” between a certain meme sound that emanates from a Freddy Fazbear plushie, to the inclusion of an integral video game figure that I won’t spoil. The intent with this franchise seems to be not to promote the esteem of the video game medium in film (which continues to be counteracted by disasters like “A Minecraft Movie” and “Borderlands”), but rather to give fans a new version of the same exact thing they already have and know they like. There’s no artistry involved, and the filmmakers know it. At some point, we just gotta accept that these movies aren’t really trying to be “movies” at all.

Now playing in theaters.