Divalicious Review: Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 Short Circuits
By Caroline Cao | December 4, 2025 | Celebrity & Culture
I would rather stare at an empty paper plate with pizza grease than watch Five Nights at Freddy’s 2. There’s not enough comic and horror to chew on for my taste, and I find it doubtful for even fans of the first movie or video game to enjoy the extended carnage.
A disclaimer here: I have not seen the first movie, although I did play the first game and one of its sequels. It’s hard not to absorb the appeal of the game, a strategy of patience and timing, as the player is seated in a secure night watch chair and clicking through the numerous surveillance cameras. It’s to my displeasure that Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 would not function as a pleasant gateway into the franchise, and you’re better off trying out the games.
Josh Hutcherson, a talent himself in the Hunger Games, is fairly bland as Mike Schmidt, a former security guard at the Chuck E. Cheese knockoff arcade-with-animatronics Five Nights at Freddy’s, who is raising his younger sister (a sweet-faced Piper Rubio) Abby.
Abby is in a period of mourning. To recap the last movie, she befriended the animatronics, which contained the spirits of murdered children, and her spirit friends had their animatronic shells silenced. This loneliness makes her susceptible to a nefarious force in a different Five Nights at Freddy’s venue. A sinister spirit of a murdered child sees Abby as a perfect key to leave the building they’re tethered to.
Directed by Emma Tammi and written by Scott Cawthon, who is also the game’s creator, the sequel to Five Nights at Freddy’s is, well, to put it bluntly —— just bad. Although Cawthon developed a charming horror game, it doesn’t appear he has gained competency in the plotting of this film. The characters are as dimensional as wind-up dolls with manufactured emotions, with Vanessa Shelly (Elizabeth Lail), a police officer and Mike’s love interest, coming closest to a compelling traumatic background tied to her daddy issues. The jump scares (a closed fridge door and pop-up scary faces) are inexcusably rookie as well.
I do have a few praises: One is the poppable haunting score by The Newton Brothers. Two is the Jim Henson’s Creature Shop craftsmanship on a chilling entity known as the Marionette. Alas, you would hope that the film’s practical effects choreography had more instinct to play with the Marionette as a sneaky entity, but its attacks feel typical.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 opens in theaters on December 5.
Photo images: Universal
