Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is a 2025 supernatural horror film directed by Emma Tammi, written by video game creator Scott Cawthon himself, and produced by Jason Blum's Blumhouse. It is the sequel to the 2023 adaptation, and it is based on the events of the second game in the wildly popular Five Nights at Freddy's series. Josh Hutcherson returns as Mike Schmidt, alongside Piper Rubio as his younger sister Abby, Elizabeth Lail, Matthew Lillard as William Afton, and newcomer McKenna Grace as Lisa. I want to be upfront about my relationship with all of this: I am not a Five Nights fan, and this film made it extremely clear that being a fan is a prerequisite for enjoying it.

Let me start with what this actually is, because the layers are genuinely dizzying. It is a sequel, to a movie, adapted from a video game, drawing specifically on that game's own sequel. We are several rungs deep into a ladder of adaptation, and whatever spark made people fall in love with the source has been diluted at every step down. Whatever you are hoping this delivers, I suspect it delivers less.

The core issue is that this film was not built for a general audience. It was built, lovingly and almost exclusively, for the hardcore fandom. Cawthon's screenplay is packed with lore, references, and blink-and-you-miss-them Easter eggs that will delight the forum-dwelling faithful and mean absolutely nothing to anyone watching casually. I sat through scene after scene that was clearly landing for someone, somewhere, and I felt like a tourist in a private in-joke. That is not inherently a crime, plenty of films reward their devotees, but when the fan service is the entire meal rather than the seasoning, everyone else is left hungry.

Then there are the scares, which reveal a fundamental confusion at the heart of the film. It mistakes volume for fear. The overwhelming majority of the jump scares are engineered by simply cranking the sound to a punishing level while something lunges at the lens. My heart rate rose, but only in the way it rises when a smoke alarm goes off in the middle of the night. That is a startle reflex, not dread, and a horror film that leans on it this heavily has run out of actual ideas.

I was also frustrated by how little time the film gives the two performers I most wanted to see. Josh Hutcherson, the anchor of the first film, is pushed to the margins here as the story reorients around Abby, and McKenna Grace, a genuinely excellent young actor, is given almost nothing to work with. Every so often the film would show a flicker of something better, a moment where I thought it was about to click into gear, and then it would deflate before it got anywhere.