In the middle of a snow-swept street, which at night seems wholly abandoned to the chill of twilight, sits a solitary box. This wooden black cube, and the even more abject dark secrets contained therein, is the tantalizing hook of Bryan Bertino’s Vicious. It is in this object, we are warned, awaits a mystery that will seal Dakota Fanning’s fate. And as a strange caller at the door intones, if she does not accept this truth, then she will die that very evening.
In an age of high-concept genre metaphors grappling with the weight of mortality, mental illness, or the meaning of God and the Devil, the box and the film which it anchors position themselves as a meaty parable eager to say something of import. And yet, after 98 minutes in their company at this year’s Fantastic Fest, the biggest mystery might be how hollow and threadbare the interior life is on such a handsome film.
Bertino certainly has his talents on display in the film. In a previous decade, he even masterminded the cult standard for home invasion thrillers when he wrote and directed The Strangers—a film they keep attempting to redo but never match, including via Renny Harlin’s truly dire The Strangers – Chapter 2 (which also assaulted Austinites at Fantastic Fest this past weekend). Vicious, by contrast, actually has some notes of merit.
The atmosphere is bleakly oppressive in its wintry hews and hushed performances, chief among them being the elder Fanning sister, who is overdue for a plumb adult role in genre or otherwise. She is compellingly terrified here, too, as a thirtysomething ne’er-do-well who never really found a place in this life beyond the old decaying home of a grandparent. She was trapped there long before a terrific, if all too briefly used, Kathryn Hunter shows up as the caller in the night. Why Hunter picked this woman’s house and feels the need to bequeath Fanning the mystery box is not immediately clear, but it draws the viewer in as much as Bertino’s terse sound design. The filmmakers use the solitude of an empty house to bear down on the viewer, which in turn makes the sudden audible presence of a seeming spirit from the box all the more stark.
