Eight years after originally being announced, the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie has finally been released to divisive reception. With Rotten Tomatoes providing a 30% critics score and an 87% score from audiences, the film has garnered a large array of opinions. With all that in mind, the movie has highs and lows that should be considered before viewing, some of which could easily impact your view of the film when watching.

The first and most important thing that should be noted about the film is that despite being listed and advertised as a “horror film”, it’s much more of a supernatural thriller. To elaborate on this, the film barely even attempts to actually be scary for the majority of its runtime, more often choosing to focus on maintaining a level of tension and mystery. For a movie based on a game series known for its jumpscares, the character with the most jumpscares is actually more of a gag character than anything else.

Something else of note about the film is that it follows the trend set by the series’ novels, The Silver Eyes trilogy, of being based on the characters, locations, and framework of the games while opting to tell its own original unrelated story. One relatively spoiler-free example would be the series main antagonist, William Afton, who (along with the rest of his family) sports a noticeable British accent in the games, with this accent being missing in the film adaptation. Another example would be the layout of the establishment, with it clearly being based on location from the original game, while containing some very noticeable differences, such as a prize counter and an archway.

While the movie’s plot remains mostly independent from the continuity of the games, there are details that will likely go completely over casual viewers’ heads if they are not at least somewhat familiar with the lore of the games. An example of this would be the strange killing device seen in the trailers, where a Freddy mask with small saw-blades gets lowered onto a security guard who is bound to a chair. This never gets explained in the movies, though if you are familiar with the lore of the games, you would know that William Afton (one of the co-founders of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza) is known for creating killing machines in order to harvest a soul energy called remnant, that he uses in order to experiment with by injecting into his machines, causing them to become possessed. With this tidbit in mind, it would be safe to assume that this unexplained device falls into this category of remnant harvesting machinery.

Though even with this all out of the way, expectations should be tempered. This movie does a great job at being a Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, a decent job at being a movie, and a poor job at being a horror movie. There are moments in the film that don’t quite land or that can feel slightly jarring, which is a shame, as some of these moments felt like the film was trying something slightly experimental and just barely missed the mark. The acting was solid, nothing award-winning, but better than a TV-movie, and the Jim Henson Company did a phenomenal job with the animatronics. While far from perfect, the movie is a solid 7/10 film that could easily be enjoyed by fans and newcomers to the series alike.