‘Five Nights at Freddy’s 2’ Is At Least Scarier Than the First One

The Five Nights at Freddy’s videogame fanbase has a loyal audience beyond my understanding. Having played the games sporadically, I felt equipped to enjoy the first film, but immediately turned to reddit threads to understand the significance of Vanessa and Mike. This lore, as it were, seems the lifeblood of the sprawling fandom, something Blumhouse almost seems to have stumbled into and now doubled down on after the smashing box office success of Five Nights at Freddy’s

Now, a couple of years later, Fazbear is back and meaner than ever in this overwrought fan service sequel that’s more of a basket of easter eggs than it is a coherent narrative. Mike (Josh Hutcherson) and Abby (Piper Rubio) are reeling from the events of the last flick, now getting settled in their new home and more normal lives. Abby, though she has been successfully able to trade her story of surviving an animatronic uprising for social capital, misses her real friends: those ghost kids trapped in the murderous pizza mascots. Mike tries to feign normalcy by telling Abby he will “fix” her friends later while he gets into an ill-advised relationship with Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail). But the house of cards quickly collapses when Abby, motivated to visit her friends, is summoned to the original Freddy Fazbear’s where she meets a new villain, the Marionette, who is disguised as her good pal, Chica. Thinking she is helping her friends, Abby becomes sucked into a plot to allow the animatronics out into the world, all at the behest of the Marionette who holds the soul of Vanessa’s late young friend, Charlotte (Audrey Lynn Marie).

Game creator, Scott Cawthon, who took over solo writing duties for this installment, cleverly adds a brand-new FF location as a means of introducing the audience to new characters not seen in the first. But he does so in a way that declines to explain how no one seems to have known of this pizzeria, one that’s within biking distance of the other. That’s the level of care brought to most of this messily written menace of a movie. Reveals and twists aren’t just forecast, they’re told and retold, geography is inconsistent making it difficult to track the characters, and the conflict is so flat that the ending feels out of nowhere since it’s not a natural conclusion to anything we saw happen. It’s evident by the mid and post-credits scenes that this functions as a sequel setup, but it’s unclear to the audience wanting payoff from this film who are set up to expect a bloodbath at “FazFest” which has been postered all over the movie’s walls.

Hutcherson does his best as the earnest big brother, and his believable warmth makes everyone else seem completely out of their depth. Even a surprise role from Skeet Ulrich, who gets the Jennifer Love Hewitt I Know What You Did Last Summer treatment by doing his one scene seated at a table in a random house nowhere near the main set, seems to be confused about what kind of movie he is performing in. A hammed up performance from Freddy Carter as Michael is the best we get, but the air is taken so quickly out of it the second he tells the audience his name.

But I said this one was scarier, and I meant it. The cold open is brutal. Not gruesome but brutally comes for kids in a way the first seemed to shy away from. It writes a check the rest of the movie seems unwilling to cash, unfortunately, but it at least gives one of the better scenes I expect to see out of this franchise. What’s even more fun, though, is when Mike is finally marooned in the security office and tasked with staving off the walking mascots while trying to locate and disarm ones off-site. It’s the closest we’ve gotten to seeing the actual game on screen, and seeing him kvetch about the lack of a door is funny (the first time).

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 was rewarding to see in a dedicated crowd because you can draft off the excited reactions of others to easter eggs and reveals that might not hit for the casual fans among us. But, by favoring the character reveals over basic plotting, FNAF2 becomes another fan-service mess for the “but it did well at the box office” heap.

Five Nights at Freddy’s hits theaters December 5, 2025