Josh Hutcherson wears the same dead-eyed, exhausted cardigan throughout most of this picture, and if I'm honest, that knitwear is doing half the heavy lifting for his character's backstory. We meet him in a state of perpetual bureaucratic purgatory, losing a custody battle because he cannot stop daydreaming about his brother getting snatched by a guy in a denim jacket two decades ago. It’s a very specific brand of 1990s trauma that feels less like genuine grief and more like a sticky patch of carpet you can't quite scrape off your sneaker. The movie wants us to care deeply about Mike Schmidt's paternal obligations to his little sister Abby, played with a sort of flat-affect competence by Piper Rubio, but the script keeps dragging them into these weird dream-sequence forests where nobody talks like a real person. They are just props for the exposition machine. Emma Tammi directs with the kind of cautious, brightly lit reverence you usually see in corporate training videos, making sure you never get too disoriented by the shadows or the lore. Every camera movement feels like it was pre-approved by a committee of anxious teenagers on Reddit who spent six years writing wiki entries about killer robots with glowing eyes. The animatronics themselves, built by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, are genuinely gorgeous chunks of rubber and steel that deserve a much better movie than this, though they spend an awful lot of time just standing around the corners of rooms looking mildly inconvenienced. There’s a scene where Mike falls asleep on the job—again, because he is aggressively narcoleptic when narrative convenience demands it—and the film forgets to be scary for about twenty minutes while he hangs out with ghostly kids in a meadow. It's the kind of pacing choice that makes you check your watch and realize you still have an entire hour of plot left about haunted arcade cabinets and remote-controlled tasers.

Elizabeth Lail shows up as a local beat cop who just happens to know every single dark secret about the abandoned pizzeria where Mike is currently pulling night shifts, and her dialogue sounds like it was generated by typing police procedural tropes into an early version of ChatGPT. She arrives at the restaurant alone, in the dark, without calling for backup, which is standard horror movie logic, but she does it with this bizarrely cheerful demeanor that suggests she's just dropping off a casserole. Kat Conner Sterling gets the thankless job of playing the nagging aunt who wants custody of Abby so she can collect government checks, and she plays her with maximum volume and zero shading, chewing the scenery like it's made of particularly tough steak. It's a loud, unsubtle performance that would look right at home in some of the broader, more chaotic comedies you find in mainstream Bollywood, where character motivations change on a dime just to set up the next gag or confrontation. Only here, the gag is a giant yellow rabbit crushing someone inside a springlock suit. The tone lurches wildly from family melodrama to mild jump scares without ever finding a middle gear that works. Hutcherson tries to anchor it all with his trademark hangdog expression, but he looks less like a troubled security guard and more like a guy who just missed his bus and has decided to wait four hours for the next one. The supporting cast members cycle in and out of the frame with the mechanical predictability of a conveyor belt, delivering exposition about missing children with the enthusiasm of high schoolers reading Shakespeare aloud on a Friday afternoon. It's a small thing, but the sound design keeps dropping these identical heavy metal door-slam effects every single time someone walks into an office, and after the fourth time, it starts to feel less like tension-building and more like a software glitch.

The cinematography relies heavily on a teal-and-orange color palette that feels about ten years past its expiration date, washing every hallway in a muddy, digital glow that robs the sets of any tactile grit. You can tell they built these massive, impressive sets of the dining area and the backstage party rooms, but the lighting flattens them out until they look like a haunted house walkthrough at a regional theme park. There is no sense of geography. Mike walks down a hallway that looks thirty feet long, turns a corner, and suddenly he's in a vast subterranean cavern filled with arcade cabinets and VHS tapes. The soundtrack doesn't help matters, leaning on a synth-heavy score that mimics John Carpenter without understanding how to let a silence breathe. It just hums away in the background, a relentless wall of bass that tells you exactly how to feel before the character on screen even reacts. Fans of Hindi films might recognize this specific brand of emotional hand-holding, where the music swells to explain an internal state that the actor hasn't quite managed to project through their performance. Except here, instead of a sweeping romantic ballad, you get twenty minutes of low-frequency thrumming that makes your popcorn bucket vibrate in your lap. The editing cuts away from the actual violence with such polite regularity that you start to wonder why they bothered setting a horror film in a slaughterhouse at all. Every time a killer cupcake or a giant yellow chicken corners a security guard, the camera politely looks at a wall or cuts to a wide shot of the building's exterior while a muffled crunch echoes on the audio track. It's bloodless, PG-13 comfort horror designed not to upset anyone who bought a ticket with their allowance.

Underneath all the lore about child murderers wearing mascot suits and police officers with family secrets, the movie is basically an extended meditation on the exhaustion of modern gig work and the nightmare of the rental market. Mike is trapped between a predatory state agency that wants to strip him of his kid and a dead-end job that pays in nickels, and the pizzeria itself functions as a monument to the decaying infrastructure of late-capitalist strip malls. In that sense, it shares a weird DNA with something like Sean Baker's The Florida Project, though without any of the human observation or visual poetry that made that film actually sting. Here, the poverty is just an aesthetic choice, a way to make the bleakness of the setting match the protagonist's perpetually rumpled flannel shirts. The dead kids aren't really characters; they're plot devices wearing bedsheets, hanging out in pillow forts and drawing pictures with crayons to help Mike solve the mystery of who put them in the suits. It's a surprisingly domestic view of the supernatural, where ghosts just want to play pirate ship and hang out in the ball pit instead of doing anything genuinely terrifying. Even the main villain, played with a sort of bored theatricality by Matthew Lillard in the final fifteen minutes, treats his career as a child serial killer like he's managing a slightly difficult franchise location for a corporate restaurant chain. He gives a little speech about property rights and trespassing that sounds less like a demonic psychopath and more like an HOA president who takes his job way too seriously. The themes of memory and grief are dropped the moment a robot bear starts playing the piano, which happens more often than you might expect. By the time the credits roll, the film has completely abandoned its own premise of workplace paranoia in favor of a messy family reunion in the back of a taxi cab.

The practical creature effects remain the one undeniable bright spot in a production that otherwise feels assembled from spare parts and focus-group notes. When Foxy the Pirate sprints down the corridor with his hook out, or when Bonnie the Bunny looms over a sleeping child with those dead, glossy eyes, there is a tangible weight to the frame that CGI simply cannot replicate. You can see the wear and tear on the fur, the grease stains near the mechanical joints, the subtle imperfections that make them look like real objects occupying physical space with the actors. It's too bad the script insists on burying these creations in murky, poorly choreographed action sequences where nobody can throw a punch without three rapid-fire edit cuts getting in the way. The climax involves a lot of people yelling at each other in a room that looks like an unfinished basement while a animatronic yellow rabbit stands in the corner waiting for his cue to do a slow turn. It lacks any real momentum, stumbling toward its predictable conclusion with the sluggish grace of a shopping cart with one stuck wheel. You leave the theater thinking about the costumes, mostly, and wondering why nobody thought to give the guy in the rabbit suit something interesting to do besides growl in a deep voice. There's a sequel already guaranteed by the box office receipts, which means we will almost certainly be back in this dusty, neon-lit purgatory in a couple of years, watching Josh Hutcherson wear a different color cardigan while someone explains the lore of the cupcake all over again.