Crew
Director/Screenplay – Bryan Bertino, Producers – Bryan Bertino & Richard Suckle, Photography – Tristan Nyby, Music – Tom Schraeder, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jason Van Haverbeke, Visual Effects – MPC (Supervisor – Greg Astles), Special Effects Supervisor – Ben Belanger, Production Design – Jennifer Spence. Production Company – Atlas Independent.
Cast
Dakota Fanning (Polly), Kathryn Hunter (The Woman), Mary McCormack (Mother), Devyn Nokoda (Tara), Klea Scott (Neighbor Woman), Rachel Blanchard (Lainie), Emily Mitchell (Aly), Bauston Camilleri (Father)
Plot
Polly is at home in her apartment one evening preparing for a school admissions interview when she is interrupted by a knock at the door. It is an elderly woman who says she is looking for someone who used to live there. The woman appears confused and Polly invites her in. The woman gives Polly a box as a gift but appears increasingly more disturbed. However, when the woman tells her she is going to die, Polly tosses her out. Later the box appears inside the apartment. Polly opens it to find it contains an hourglass. In talking to her mother on the phone, the voice on the other end turns into someone else who seems to know Polly’s inner secrets. The voice tells her that she must places three things inside the box – something she hates, something she loves and something she needs – otherwise she will die.
Bryan Bertino has become one of the Must Watch directors on my radar ever since he first appeared with the impressive home invasion film The Strangers (2008). This gained a strong reputation after it first came out. Bertino followed this with the Found Footage film Mockingbird (2014), the roadside monster film The Monster (2016) and The Dark and the Wicked (2020). He has also produced the likes of The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), Stephanie (2017), Hurt (2018), The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018) and The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024).
I have always maintained Bryan Bertino is a director worth far more than he is given credit for, even if most of his films post-The Strangers have never quite hit the same mark. In Vicious, Bertino keeps the film in a constant state of eeriness – in one scene, a figure stands behind Dakota Fanning for several seconds until we suddenly realise something is there and then a whispered voice comes on the soundtrack. There a number of effective jumps – a hand reaching out in the closet behind Dakota’s back; her own reflection and bloodied self appearing; a hand reaching up out of the box to grab her. The creepiest scene is where Dakota Fanning is one the phone with her mother (voiced by a never-seen Mary McCormack) who starts digging into personal information before abruptly telling Dakota: “I’m not your mother.”
There has been a history of films about sinister boxes from The Box (2009) to The Special (2020). Although if anything, what we have with Vicious is more like a film such as 13 Sins (2014), Level Up (2016) or Nerve (2016), even an imprisonment thriller like Await Further Instructions (2018), where people are forced into circumstances that require them to do increasingly more extreme things. Here there is no explanation ever given for what the box is. It just simply is.
The title Vicious sounds like this is one of those copycats with a malevolent-sounding name that came out in the aftermath of James Wan’s Insidious (2010) with the likes of Sinister (2012), Pernicious (2014), Demonic (2015), The Diabolical (2015), Luciferous (2015), Ominous (2015) and Malicious (2018). In actuality, the title Vicious sounds forced as there is nothing in the film that is can be said to apply to – the box exudes a malevolent spell but vicious is an adjective that sounds far more as though it comes with intentional malice.
Dakota Fanning was a standout child actor in in particular I Am Sam (2001), tv’s Taken (2002) and Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) but has never found such high-profile roles as an adult actress – she was in the massively popular Twilight films but disappeared into the background. She certainly gets a good workout throughout the course of the story here. For all that, Vicious is a film where Bryan Bertino creates a fascinating situation that winds up the central character and provides a number of jumps, but never quite pushes the film further than that. What we have feels like a half-hour episode of an anthology series that has been extruded to fill an entire film.
Trailer here