Vicious Review: An Engaging Dakota Fanning Stars in Bryan Bertino’s Hit-and-Miss Visceral Horror
Writer-director Bryan Bertino continues to explore the fear of the unknown within the confines of a residence in Vicious, five years after The Dark and the Wicked. His latest movie gets off to an eerie start: Polly (Dakota Fanning), a thirtysomething woman with somehow distracting tattooed arms living alone in a big house that she rents from her sister. Her life is in shambles, looking all burnt out while barely bothered about returning missed calls, and there’s a stack of dirty dishes on the kitchen sink.
Just as she is trying to sort things out, someone knocks at the door. Who could it be at this time of the freezing night? She goes over to the front door and opens it, and finds an elderly woman (Kathryn Hunter) standing on the porch. She looks lost, and Polly wants to help her by inviting her inside. The woman seems harmless at first, until she places a wooden box and an hourglass on the table. Maybe she wants to show Polly something. But it gets weirder when she tells Polly will die tonight.
After Polly manages to usher the woman out of the house and calls her mother (Mary McCormack) to tell her what happens, it’s far from over. There’s something sinister about the box that she can’t get rid of. A series of things that go bump in the night begins to haunt her while she is stuck at home. Bertino incorporates malevolent fear and anxiety revolving around the box while using the house setting to evoke a sense of ominous dread and claustrophobia.
And for a while there, it works with some effective jump scares accompanied by slow-burning tension. Given the title, Bertino doesn’t shy away from graphic violence with lots of blood and dismembered body parts as a result of cutting and stabbing. He also includes supernatural elements in his movie, similar to what he did in The Dark and the Wicked. At one point, when Polly tries to seek assistance from someone close by within her neighbourhood, the ensuing scene ends with one of the most visceral yet gory set pieces in Vicious.
Bertino knows well how to make use of a classic song to his advantage, notably The Mamas & the Papas’ “Dedicated to the One I Love”, which plays every now and turn in the movie. Who could have imagined a sweet, harmonious song such as this would send shivers down the spine? Credit also goes to Fanning for her predominantly one-woman show as a stressed-out young woman in disarray. Her performance is one of the reasons that keeps me watching, but only to a certain extent.
Vicious may have clocked in a modest 98-minute long, but instead of a taut pacing that sustains the momentum until the end, Bertino seems to be losing his plot as the story progresses. That’s a pity because the movie looks promising during the earlier stretch, only to grow tedious in an annoyingly rinse-and-repeat structure.
Bertino’s over-reliance on the same old jump scares, loud noises and some of the usual horror tropes soon deflates. Perhaps a shorter runtime while putting an effort to come up with some inventive scares, might do the movie justice. Not to mention the erratic pacing often resulted in a stop-start momentum, coupled with a third act, which I’m expecting an all-hell-breaks-loose finale, is unfortunately dragged out longer than it should be, to the point it overstays its welcome. So much for the anticipation that I’ve been looking forward to Bryan Bertino’s latest horror movie after a long five-year wait since his tense Dark and the Wicked.
Vicious is currently streaming on Paramount+.
