2025 | starring Dakota Fanning, Kathryn Hunter | directed by Bryan Bertino | 1 hr 38 mins | 2 out of 5 stars |
2025 Halloween Horrorfest #7
Almost 20 years ago, Bryan Bertino hooked horror movie audiences with a band of serial killers who went after you just because you were home. 2008’s The Strangers was a home invasion movie stripped down to the studs, it lacked genre inertia and was a blatant rip-off of the French film Them, but it captured horror-hounds’ imagination. Bertino has been working that horror muscle in different efforts over the last few years now and the latest is Vicious, an indie Hulu release just in time for Halloween and headlined by a terrific performance from Dakota Fanning.
Polly (Fanning) is spending a snowed in night alone until a mysterious woman (Kathryn Hunter) shows up and gifts her a box. It’s empty inside but soon Polly starts having hallucinations that tell her what to do with the box: give it something she loves, something she hates and something she needs before an hourglass runs out.
I wouldn’t call Vicious a high-concept film. A high concept movie is one where you hear the premise and it instantly inspires the imagination and springs to life story potential in the head of the viewer. I heard about this and just went “Huh?”. “Give it” how? How does it know? What qualifies and how much? What happens if you don’t comply? That we learn soon enough and its bad things as Polly runs across the street to get help from a neighbor and the box possesses her too. From there the movie becomes a single-location descent into madness where Fanning is subjected to one hallucination after another to guide, trick and taunt her through a journey that it both wants and impedes her from taking. It’s theoretically scary to face off with an omnipotent supernatural force, its also frustrating as a movie-goer when there are no rules at all and the force can do anything it wants any time it wants and our hero is just supposed to gut it out for the duration.
Fanning dives headlong into every mind-trip Bertino throws at her here, which is almost the only reason this isn’t a complete washout. Hunter is also a delight to see, last seen being punished for her rubber-faced talents in the worst movie of 2024, The Front Room. From a production standpoint, Bertino has some handle on the horror elements here delivering creepy images and jumps to keep the average streaming watcher on their toes, particularly a ghostly mirror sequence. It’s to no end however, Vicious is very literally a mystery box movie with a literal empty mystery box that serves as an easy metaphor for the film itself.
Bertino knows what he’s doing here in terms of pulling the horror movie visual and sonic strings, but he’s wrestling uphill with a concept that doesn’t really translate into a story. I don’t really have advise on how it could have been improved because I have no idea what the movie was even trying for this with love, hate, need thing. The “need” answer becomes very visceral in a cringing piece of body horror (a similar reveal worked much better in this year’s The Ugly Stepsister). Vicious is a chamber film that follows the mental dissolution of a main character we barely know under rules that keep getting re-written toward goals the movie doesn’t articulate with a villain that isn’t fightable. It’s all deeply unsatisfying.