I’m gonna start…
Main Cast: Dakota Fanning, Kathryn Hunter
Director: Bryan Bertino
By the time she was 11, Dakota Fanning had worked with the likes of Sean Penn, Robert DeNiro, Denzel Washington and Tom Cruise. I knew from an early age she was going to grow up to be an amazing actress.
Likewise, writer/director Bryan Bertino started with movies like THE STRANGERS, THE MONSTER (a personal favorite), THE DARK AND THE WICKED, not to mention his EP credit on STEPHANIE (another personal favorite), so in my mind he’s a sure thing when it comes to horror movies.
Put the two together and you wind up with 2025’s VICIOUS.
Polly (Fanning) is a woman on the outs with life. Early 30s, she’s got a job that’s taking her nowhere and is wondering if she should go back to school. The night before an important interview, she gets a knock on the door. A woman (Kathyrn Hunter), who seems slightly disoriented, says she’s looking for a friend she thought lived at Polly’s address. With the winter weather outside, Polly invites the woman in to let her call her son.
Then things get dark. The woman sets a small wooden box and an hourglass on the table and says they now belong to Polly—she also tells Polly she’s going to die tonight.
The box is hungry, Polly learns, and it has specific items it wants her to feed to it. Starting with something she hates. Polly assumes it means the cigarettes she is constantly puffing on. So she puts them in the box and closes it. But the box rejects them, insisting it wants something she HATES.
What does Polly hate? God, ever since her father died of cancer. So she puts her dad’s crucifix into the box and it accepts it. But by then things are way too dark and Polly doesn’t want to play anymore.
The box, however, doesn’t care, and it knows Polly better than she knows herself. More items follow, something she needs, something she loves. And if Polly puts the wrong item into the box? Someone dies. If she refuses to play? Someone dies. And the box knows just how to hurt Polly if she starts to get rebellious.
Bertino excels at horror movies set in one location with minimal characters, and with VICIOUS, he really amps up the tension almost from the start. Fanning plays Polly as a woman on the edge, desperately grasping for anything in the world to make sense, while we the viewers are left to hold on tight and take this insane journey with her.
I feel things sort of fell apart a bit at the end, but whether that was a story element or I got distracted and missed a detail, I don’t know. At the time I figured the movie as a whole had been so fun and satisfying that of course the ending won’t be able to live up to the rest of it. But in retrospect it’s entirely possible I zoned out for a second or answered a text from my wife or something.
But even not fully understanding what’s happening in the end, I thoroughly enjoyed VICIOUS. This might not have been Fanning’s best performance but I really respect the choices she’s made the last few years (this and WATCHERS, which I thought was far from perfect, but still underrated). And I’m so much in the bag for anything Bertino wants to do from here on out. Whatever it is, bring it on and I’ll watch it with pleasure. VICIOUS was, for me, insane, fun, and when watched under the right circumstances, like you’re home alone on a winter night while your wife is out of town, terrifying.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
Leave a Reply