We used to be a country. A proper country. Five Nights at Freddy’s.
Photo: Patti Perret/Universal Studios

The new horror movie Five Nights at Freddy’s, based on the ultrapopular video-game series, takes place largely inside an abandoned children’s pizza parlor with singing animatronic animals, modeled after the real-life Chuck E. Cheese pizza-arcade franchise. Actual Chuck E. Cheese outlets are still very much around. In fact, they’ve been expanding overseas in recent years. But you could be forgiven for assuming that the business shuttered years ago; it feels very much like an artifact of the ’80s. (It was all the rage when I was 10, as I recall.)

The fictional arcade-restaurant in the movie, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, plays into this idea as well. When the dusty animatronic animals creak back to life and start singing in the film, the songs they play are such ’80s hits as the Romantics’ “Talking in Your Sleep.” This is supposed to be scary, I suppose, but it’s mostly just sad. As are the brief, fragmented glimpses of these giant abandoned robot critters we get throughout the film — flashlight beams illuminating a giant unblinking eye here, a once-shiny limb there.

Old, abandoned things are supposed to be creepy, of course, but surveying the grim detritus of this particular setting, with its dust-covered posters and fake stained-glass booths, it’s hard not to think of all the many empty businesses and malls (or, for that matter, movie theaters) of an America that used to pride itself on the bustle and beauty of its gleaming gathering places. Five Nights at Freddy’s takes place around 2000, but it could easily be taking place right now, in the age of communal collapse, in a country where people don’t want to be around other people anymore. Who needs Charles Entertainment Cheese and his big, shiny ADHD arcade with salty pizza, screaming children, and giant, tacky singing robot creatures when we’ve all got our individual screens and echo chambers to keep us company?

Before you ask if I’m losing my mind (though, for the record, the answer is always yes), know that the brain tends to wander in the presence of catastrophic inanity. Five Nights at Freddy’s, the movie, is the kind of hollowed-out exercise in atrociousness that pretty much forces you to mull other things, be they what you’re having for dinner, the decline of American community, or the heat death of the universe. Which is crazy, because there is a giant face-eating cupcake in this picture. You’d think that would be interesting, or at least interestingly shot.

But, alas, the overwhelming, soul-crushing bleakness of Emma Tammi’s film steamrolls any momentary promise of fun. Its central protagonist, Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), is a security guard who’s buckling under the weight of unprocessed childhood trauma: He was supposed to be minding his younger brother during a family picnic when the boy was abducted, many years ago. Now, with his parents gone, Mike has to take care of his kid sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), even though their sniveling aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson) wants custody of her. In other words, Mike desperately needs to keep the job he gets as the night watchman of an old abandoned Freddy’s restaurant. Mike is also convinced that the dreams he’s having about his brother’s abduction will eventually reveal clues as to what happened to the boy, so he reads up on dream analysis and tries to relax himself to sleep while on the job so as to keep having visions of that fateful day. No spoilers, but these plot threads are eventually united in the most inept way imaginable.

But maybe there’s method to the movie’s mediocrity. Part of the success of the Five Nights at Freddy’s video games relied on their status as a genuinely scary product for children. The games offer real horror-movie thrills in a kid-friendly context, a kind of genre starter kit with cross-generational appeal. So, the movie isn’t particularly scary, but it’s full of jump-scares. Its characters are resoundingly one-dimensional, but they’re all stone-faced and haunted, the way horror-movie protagonists are supposed to be. They say idiotic things, but they’re the kinds of adorably idiotic things a kid might imagine grown-ups saying in grown-up films. And the whole thing is so underpopulated that when we finally learn who’s been masterminding all these murderous goings-on at Freddy’s, the reveal falls completely flat because there’s literally nobody else left in the movie.

Five Nights at Freddy’s takes itself too seriously, but that might actually make it a hit. If it was too frivolous or colorful or goofy, it would turn off adults. But if its scares had any real meat to them, or if its plot hysterics about trauma felt in any way genuine, the film might feel inappropriate for kids. So what we’re left with are a lot of supposed-to-bes: things that are supposed to be scary, or supposed to be serious, or supposed to be grown-up. At heart, Five Nights at Freddy’s is a nowhere movie, neither here nor there — which might be precisely where it needs to be.