A friend of mine’s dad once nailed his garden gate shut during Halloween to stop kids knocking on his door, which seemed a bit curmudgeonly to me at the time. In hindsight, he’d have probably survived a Bryan Bertino movie. The man responsible for The Strangers, several of its various sequels, and now Vicious, clearly has a profound distaste for unwanted visitors, who do nothing but cause carnage for the characters in his movies, largely just because. There’s a similar vibe to this flick, streaming on Paramount+ and shouldered capably by Dakota Fanning, who’s in it entirely on her own for large stretches. But it also has a bit more ambiguous and potentially metaphorical quasi-supernatural weirdness, which is fun to think about but harder to explain. There’s no shrugging “you were home” to rationalise all this.
Fanning plays Polly, a 30-year-old who seems to have nothing going for her. She lives alone, smokes heavily, and berates herself in the dark. She can’t hold a job down. Her dad is dead. And that’s before Kathryn Hunter shows up as a lady whose name I didn’t catch, who has a missing finger and a weird box and tells Polly in no uncertain terms that she’s going to die. Everyone’s going to die eventually, of course, but Polly understandably takes the sentiment to mean she’s going to die imminently. Kathryn exits the building, but leaves the box. Uh-oh.
The box is weird. It contains nothing but a sand timer, but as soon as it’s in Polly’s possession, odd horror-movie stuff starts happening everywhere. Her phone calls with her mother take on a demonic contour. She starts being followed around by ghoulish figures. She hears snippets of screaming and sees snatches of violence. It’s eventually explained to her that the box requires three things of her: Something she hates, something she loves, and something she needs. If she doesn’t feed the box each thing before the sand runs through completely, something will happen. And it probably won’t be good.
The twist, though, is that the box can’t be outsmarted or conned. Polly’s initial efforts to outfox it by feeding it a packet of cigarettes – which to a smoker could reasonably qualify for any of the three categories – she’s found out instantly. No cheating. The self-examination must be rigorous and painful, and the sacrifices must be serious – and probably, this being a horror movie, also painful.
The bold choice made here is to have Polly be the only character, more or less. Once Kathryn Hunter departs, Polly is on her own, and aside from one or two very brief encounters with neighbors and a few phone calls with the voices of her mother and father, she stays that way. Dakota Fanning has to shoulder the entire movie, and she does a remarkable job, all things considered. She makes deliberately universal and run-of-the-mill problems – what am I doing with my life? – seem like searingly vital conundrums. A lot of the subtler storytelling is etched into her face, playing out in the lines of a scowl or a teary-eyed squint. She’s able to communicate her relationships with her parents, her pain over the loss of her father – and the subsequent shaking of her faith – and her innermost fears almost entirely through one-way conversations and expressions. It’s really a very good performance, just in a movie where it’s unlikely to get any credit.
But this kind of performance is essential, both because the movie relies on it and because the true nature of what Vicious is up to is very deliberately inscrutable, and you need a sophisticated actor to sell it. There are typical horror-movie things here, including not-infrequent jump scares and some wince-inducing uses of practical gore, but what’s really interesting about it is the stuff it compels you to think about – which of your body parts you’d be most willing to lop off, for instance, but also deeper questions, like what aspects of your life you truly value and whether a fear of death is rational or a crutch holding you back from living your best life.
I’d love to say that Vicious concretely answers these questions, but in the manner of all modern, arty horror movies, it doesn’t. It’s so open to interpretation that it’s very likely everyone who sees it will have a slightly different take on it, but it’s underpinned by a very universal sense of craft. Bertino is a better filmmaker than a storyteller, and despite a few cliches, there’s a wonderful sense of escalating tension here that is reminiscent of a raw suspense exercise like, say, Push. He knows what he’s doing, and Fanning knows how to sell it, and however you feel about what Vicious is ultimately trying to say or be about, it’s undeniably an engaging time finding out.