Bryan Bertino had a bit of a comeback with 2020’s excellent “The Dark and the Wicked,” a film that incorporated trauma and grief into a memorably haunting narrative. The writer/director of the original “The Strangers” returns this year with “Vicious,” a film that feels like a sibling of “Dark and the Wicked” in the manner in which it plays with imagery and ideas that feel connected to mental illness and possibly even suicidal ideation, but he loses the grip this time both tonally and thematically. Despite a strong premise, Bertino struggles to define what he’s trying to say with the piece, falling back on way too many loud noises and jump scares. Dakota Fanning gives a committed performance in what is largely a one-woman show, but “Vicious” gets more frustrating as one realizes it’s not going to come together as much as be content to rip its protagonist apart.
Said protagonist is the troubled Polly (Fanning), who we know is troubled because she gets what’s basically a back story dump of voice mails from people like an annoyed boss and a worried mom. She’s 32, single, childless, and lives in the kind of large home that feels haunted even when it’s not the setting of a Fantastic Fest movie. On one of what feels like one of her lonelier winter nights, Polly hears a knock at the door, answering it to find what seems like a harmless old woman (Kathryn Hunter) who is struggling to find her son’s house. She lets her in, makes her tea, and tries to help. Never let strangers cross your threshold in the middle of the night.
After some polite banter, Hunter expertly delivers a chilling five words: “I’m going to start now.” She pulls a black box from a bag, placing it on Polly’s coffee table, and she tells the woman who has tried to show her comfort that she’s going to die tonight. All that’s in the box is an hourglass, but the mysterious stranger tells Polly that she has to put three things in the enclosure: Something she hates, something she needs, and something she loves. Before she can figure out what the heck that means, the woman is gone. And, of course, things start getting very weird for poor Polly.
Polly discovers that the box essentially comes with some companions/watchers, malevolent forces guiding Polly to what she needs to do to survive the night through phone calls from her dead dad, someone pretending to be her mom, and even worse. Maybe? Bertino is unclear on how much of anything works in this universe. When Polly tries to put her cigarettes in as something she hates, the box reveals the lie in that. She wants to hate smoking but only because she knows she’s supposed to. And then Bertino plunges into images of self-harm, making one consider how much all of “Vicious” is meant to be read as a troubled woman with nothing but her niece to make her happy considering the end of things.
Bertino under-develops too many of his themes, reminding one that he’s a better director than a writer. Luckily, he still has great skill with framing, finding just the right angles to capture Fanning’s committed, emotional performance. His best films—“The Strangers” and “The Dark and the Wicked”—were directorial feats too, studies in how to build tension through dread. But “Vicious” can’t maintain the dread like those two films, too often losing its way in jump scares and screeching sound design. It’s as if Bertino the director knows that Bertino the writer hasn’t done quite enough to engender audience interest in Polly’s plight so he seeks to pummel the audience into terror instead of drawing them in.
Perhaps the biggest problem with “Vicious” is how much Bertino’s screenplay leaves unanswered and unresolved. In fact, he punctuates his ending with a hint at the magic box’s continued torture that made me think I never knew what this movie was about in the first place. I’m not sure Bertino does either.
This review was filed from Fantastic Fest and premieres on Paramount+ on October 10.
