Happy Halloween: Vicious (2025)

Director: Bryan Bertino
Cast: Dakota Fanning, Kathryn Hunter, Rachel Blanchard, Emily Mitchell, Klea Scott, Devyn Nekoda

★★ (out of ★★★★)

Vicious begins with Dakota Fanning tearfully delivering a monologue about the pains of being alive while lit by the red glow of a nearby Christmas tree. It’s a harrowing monologue, delivered by an actress who’s talented enough to make you feel the pain behind the words coming out of her mouth. It has one preparing for a potentially compelling metaphor about the horrors of depression, and with celebrated horror auteur Bryan Bertino behind the camera, it’s certainly a very well-made movie. Unfortunately, those hopes are almost immediately dashed the second the plot starts.

The idea behind the plot is not a terrible one. Fanning plays Polly, a depressed woman who lives in a house that she rents from her sister. The house is so big that it had me wondering what her sister and her brother-in-law did for a living to afford such a massive house, but hey, it certainly has enough shadowy corridors that a horror movie like this requires.

After browsing through social media and preparing for a job interview she has the next day, she receives a knock on the door. On her porch is an older woman (Kathryn Hunter), who seems lost and confused. Because it’s snowing outside, Polly invites her inside and offers a nice cup of tea while they wait for someone to pick her up. The older woman seems friendly enough, until she pulls a small wooden box out of her bag with an hourglass and tells Polly that she’ll die if she doesn’t appease the demands of the being that haunts the box.

She says that she’ll have to give it something she hates, something she can’t live without, and something she loves. The sands remain in the top bulb until it’s time for her to make an offering. If she doesn’t make an offering before the sand runs out, she’ll die. If she does, the timer will reset. Polly kicks the woman out of the house, and the old woman leaves the box on the street outside. That is where it stays until it magically appears on the table in her living room.

She tries asking a female neighbor (Klea Scott) for help, but then the neighbor receives a phone call from “the police,” and well, she makes a very grisly exit from the story. There is no escaping. Polly has to give the box what it wants. When deciding on something she hates, she first decides on her pack of cigarettes, but the box doesn’t accept it. Her loved ones hate the fact that she smokes a lot more than she hates the habit. Then, we find out that she hates God because her father died from cancer, so she takes her father’s crucifix and puts it in the box.

This is not as deep as Bertino seems to think it is, but at least it tells us something more about Polly other than she’s depressed and needs a job. The character development stops once it comes time for her to choose the thing she can’t live without. The first task forced her to be honest with herself and revealed something about her. This time, the entity that haunts the box decides for her. It first says that she needs to cut off her pinky toe, which she does in a painfully gory scene. Then, the being is like “just kidding,” and tells her to cut off an index finger, which she also does.

Why is this the choice, given that she can live without both of those digits? The only answer I could come up with is that it gives Bertino the chance to stage a gory horror scene.

From there, the movie completely loses its focus on Polly as a character and just goes for the cheap jump scares and empty cliches. The ghost of her father shows up at one point to grab her and go “Boo!” twice. Reality becomes distorted, so that she fears that her sister Lainie (Rachel Blanchard) and her niece Aly (Emily Mitchell) are in danger of the entity that’s haunting her, which leads to a sequence where her and her niece are dead, until they’re not, but then they are again for another “scary” moment, but then…

Oh, it becomes such a headache after a while. We get more reality bending scenes where Polly is attacked by her own reflection and she sees an old video of her niece that isn’t a real video (the kid is covered in blood in the footage – not the sort of memory one would keep a recording of) until it becomes abundantly clear that the movie is just playing games and doesn’t really care about any of the ideas that were introduced at the start. Bertino completely loses the point of the story, but assumes that it was the audience that wasn’t paying attention and has a character show up at the end to explain why the entity chose Polly (as if her opening monologue wasn’t enough of a hint).

Fanning is a terrific actress, and she acts up a storm here, but it’s a good performance that’s wasted on a character that almost feels besides the point once the jump scares start. The cinematography by Tristan Nyby is at times gorgeous, so atmospheric and sleek that it almost makes up for how unscary the bulk of the movie is. The sound design, however, is so loud that it becomes obnoxious. A closet light doesn’t just flicker here, it zaps and crackles and buzzes so loudly that if you closed your eyes, you would assume that someone was being executed in an electric chair.

There are praiseworthy elements here, to be sure, but it’s all at the service of a story that feels hollow and messy. Bertino is not an untalented guy, and there was certainly enough here to make for a great and character-focused horror story. But Vicious is all about the clichés and the manipulation, and it doesn’t take long before the movie finally wears you out.

Rated R for violence, blood and gore, profanity