Review: Five Nights At Freddy’s 2

Saying that Blumhouse had a bad year would be an understatement. Virtually every movie they released in 2025, whether it was Drop or M3GAN 2.0, underperformed at the box office, and audience response was generally tepid. Things just don’t seem to be going right for Blumhouse this year, but there was always going to be a light at the end of the tunnel for the beleaguered studio. After all, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 was going to be released at the end of the year and rake in the cash.

Thanks to the media frenzy that surrounded the first film, and the inexplicable popularity of the series over a decade after it first released, Blumhouse could at least rest easy knowing they would finally have a much-needed financial hit. I mean, I went to a matinee screening of the film, and it was absolutely packed with pre-teens and kids eager to return to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. Blumhouse will make money, even if critics like me absolutely demolish the film like the first time around. Sun rise, sun set.

But you know what? As expected as it is for me to say, I wish this movie fails. I wish that Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 bombs at the box office because it’s just plain awful. It’s not simply a by-the-numbers horror film. It’s a horror movie that doesn’t even try to be anything other than a toothless cash grab that makes me regret being as harsh towards the first movie as I was.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2
Director: Emma Tammi
Release Date: December 5, 2025 (Theatrical)
Rating: PG-13

Trying to give a simple summary of the plot isn’t easy to do thanks to the overabundance of subplots that litter the film. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 begins with a flashback to a young girl named Charlotte (Audrey Lynn-Marie) being killed by William Afton (Matthew Lillard) at the original Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. That intro is quickly forgotten about in favor of reestablishing the cast from the first movie. Abby (Piper Rubio) is having a tough time adjusting to life without her animatronic friends. Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) is overcome with guilt for her role in enabling her father’s killings. And Mike (Josh Hutcherson)… does nothing. He wants to take care of Abby, but other than that, he has nothing to do.

Aimless would be the perfect word to describe the events of the plot. The first half of the film bounces between the three characters (and I guess Josh Hutcherson, who looks absolutely miserable in every scene he’s in), but it feels so glacial. The film listlessly moves from scene to scene at a snail’s pace, and it’s hard to tell what the main plot is. Is it Charlotte’s, Abby’s, or Vanessa’s? Who is the main character of the film, because as it stands, no one seems to know. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 doesn’t, so we’re treated to random scenes stitched together to vaguely approximate a plot. There’s the illusion of development, but in reality, there isn’t any.

Each character feels stubbornly static. At the beginning of the film, Abby misses the spirits of the dead children that were possessing the animatronics from the first film, and by the end, she still hasn’t come to terms with their passing. Josh Hutcherson is trying to look out for Abby at the beginning, and he’s still doing the same thing at the end. The only person who kind of sort of undergoes what can be described as an arc is Vanessa, but even then, it has less to do with her character’s development and more to do with the film telling the audience that she’s changed. There is no show here, only tell.

What makes it even worse is how dry the script is. Lines of dialogue are delivered with the enthusiasm of an IRS accountant reading the dictionary. Everyone seems so bored and is barely putting forward any effort into making the film even the slightest bit interesting. Even Matthew Lillard, who was the best thing about the first one, barely has any screentime to chew the scenery. He’s only present in two scenes, and even then, he doesn’t interact with any of the cast. Most of it was done via green screen, and that’s supposed to be good enough for the sequel. But he’s there because fans of the series wanted him to be there.

And therein lies probably the biggest flaw of the movie. The first film, for all of its misgivings, actually offered up somewhat of a unique take on the franchise. It still managed to retain the core elements of the series – killer animatronics, Mike being a security guard at a pizzeria, and the villainous William Afton – but added some levity and enough strange directorial decisions to give it its own distinct flavor. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 decides to become a slave to the games and spends the majority of the second half cramming in as many references as possible, even if they make no sense.

The film assumes that you have a deep encyclopedic understanding of the lore of Five Nights at Freddy’s. The animatronics behave and act like their video game counterparts, but it’s never explained why. Sure, I know because I played the game, but to a general audience member, it’s borderline incomprehensible what’s happening. Yes, this is an adaptation of a video game played by millions upon millions of people, but this isn’t a sequel to a video game. This is a sequel to a film, and assuming everyone here is familiar with the game was just the wrong choice.

Even if you are familiar with the games, that’s not a guarantee that Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 will make any sense. Take Charlotte, whose spirit embodies the Marionette. Why? Don’t ask. While the Marionette is able to possess animatronics, how is it able to possess humans? Not said. Why is her weakness a music box? There’s an explanation, but it’s weak as all hell. Even her motivation makes absolutely no sense. At first, it’s because she wants vengeance against the adults who failed to save her, but then it shifts to all adults, before settling on just a vague sense of rage she feels towards everyone. She’s a very ill-defined villain, and she’s not even the only one! William Afton is kind of present, as is an obviously shady security guard who clearly gives off villain vibes, but the film, again, never decides what the main focus should be.

The lack of clarity goes beyond that to the cinematography. A fair amount of the climax takes place at the original Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, but for the life of me, I couldn’t wrap my head around the dimensions of the building. There’s a sprawling lobby, a reclusive pirate area, a river that runs through the entire pizzeria, a shockingly large basement, a security office, and none of it connects whatsoever. In a video game where you’re flipping between static security cameras, that wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but in a climax that is supposed to contain giant animatronics stomping around and crushing heads, it barely registers.

Speaking of crushing heads, there’s only one scary/gory scene in the entire film, and it’s watching a Chica animatronic, played by Megan Fox, crush Wayne Knight’s skull. Oh, and it’s offscreen. I know this is a PG-13 horror movie, but there have been plenty of PG-13 horror movies that are way scarier and unnerving than this. It’s a vague approximation of terror. It has all of the ingredients, but none of the bite, none of the crowdpleasing moments, and none of the thrills you would expect. This is baby’s first horror movie, but even then, that kind of feels like an insult to the good PG-13 horror movies like Good Boy or Insidious.

All of this comes together in one of the most rushed and disappointing endings I’ve seen in a film all year. It doesn’t resolve any of its plot threads and instead spends all of its energy setting up numerous plot threads for an inevitable third movie. Nothing is learned, nothing is gained, and the film quickly cuts to black and blue balls the audience. And look, I get it. Second installments in trilogies tend to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. You want your characters to be at their lowest points, only for them to rise from the ashes for the inevitable conclusion.

When you look at Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 from that perspective, a lot of the poor decisions begin to make sense. Of course there’s no resolution to the character arcs that leave them in limbo! Of course there’s an unnecessary cliffhanger! Of course there’s a bunch of meaningless filler plot! It’s all in an effort to get you to come and see the third movie, where something interesting may actually happen! But when the second installment is this bad, this meaningless, this confused about its own existence, and this impossible to recommend, why would I come back? That’s the most insidious thing about Five Nights at Freddy’s 2. It doesn’t need to try because it assumes its audience’s standards are so low that they won’t care about its glaring flaws and will just accept more content.

I sat next to some pre-teen twerp during the movie, and it was clear that he was a fan of the series. He was commenting on all of the references and seemed to care solely about that and nothing else. After the teaser trailer for Obsession played, which actually looked like it would be a creepy and intriguing horror movie, he openly said that it looked terrible because it had no action in it.

Now, this could just have been some dumb kid who didn’t know any better and I fully admit to sounding like an elitist snob here, but when you’re calling Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 a better movie solely because it has “action” and references to stuff you understand, that kind of perfectly captures the Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 experience. It’s not a film about establishing tension, terror, or creeping out audiences. It’s a film solely for FNAF fans to point at and say it’s just like the games.

And look, I’m that same way. I loved watching Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and seeing the references pop up. But that movie was great because it was more than just references. It had to stand on its own two feet, and it did superbly. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 doesn’t. It thinks shoving references in your face is a substitute for quality. Who cares if Balloon Boy is there, or that Withered Bonnie is crawling through a vent, or a FNAF YouTuber pops up for a cameo? I’m not saying you can’t enjoy the movie, but if you did, genuinely ask yourself why that is. Is it because of the narrative, characters, theming, scares, gore, or cinematography, or is it because it’s a Five Nights at Freddy’s movie?

I could keep going, and believe me I want to, but I’m just exhausted. I genuinely hated my time with Five Nights at Freddy’s 2. I don’t know if I can call it the worst movie I saw in 2025, because there’s some stiff competition, but the fact that I’m not immediately disqualifying it should be raising alarms. I just hope that audiences don’t heap praises on it solely by virtue of its existence. For once, I beg of you, please let me be right. I would love a Christmas miracle where audiences and critics unite to crucify this film and send a message that Blumhouse needs to do better.