Vicious Review

While Renny Harlin is out bastardizing "The Strangers" franchise by remaking a sub-90 minute long film into a trilogy, its creator, Bryan Bertino, is out writing and directing other things. Unfortunately, his efforts resulted in Paramount+'s "Vicious."

Starring Dakota Fanning, who chainsmokes between screaming and crying, as Polly, a cronic underachiever on a snowy night, living in a house she rents from her far more successful sister Lainie (Rachel Blanchard), when she gets a knock on the door. She opens it to find a decrepit old woman, played by Kathryn Hunter, who says she thought she knew someone who used to live here. Polly lets her in, offering to call her a cab, when the lady pulls out a box and places it on the coffee table, gifting it to her. Polly is a bit perplexed, but that confusion soon turns to fright when the old lady starts saying "you're going to die tonight." Let this be a lesson to you kids to never talk to strangers.

Polly kicks out the old woman and the box, who proceeds to try and figure out what to wear the next day. It's "a big day" we're told, Polly apparently hoping to go back to school (I think, the film never bothers to fuss over small details like character development). But as she sits on her bed, we see a blurry figure shifting behind her. She yells "Polly," who shrieks only to turn around to an empty room. She calls her mom (Mary McCormack) in a panic, who seems to downplay the oddness of her daughter's evening in favor of chastising her cigarette habit. "You said you'd quit," she tells Polly over the phone. My mom would probably be more upset at all the expletives she says, but I digress. 

Now back in the living room but still on the phone, Polly is stunned to see the box is now on her coffee table, inside an hourglass not yet ticking down. But then plot happens, and it turns out her mom is not actually her mom but someone behind this whole thing with the old lady and the box. She says she'll die tonight unless she puts inside something she hates, something she needs and something she loves. Sounds simple enough (I'd wager the smokes would count for all three).

What follows is a confusing mess of scenes that don't really make any sense, from mirror-people, calls from dead people, neighbors who kill themselves and doors that won't open, among many others. But what can and can't happen is never explained, nor the reason why, and it is this lack of logic that isolates any of the action onscreen from resonating with us. 

Without any real purpose, "Vicious" fails as a horror movie, settling on cheap would-be jump scares, loud "bangs" and visions of things that aren't really happening; it's like a ghost movie without the ghost. Oh, and the ending, which I won't spoil, is so lame and so decidedly unscary that it's hard to imagine it coming from the same guy who crafted the depressing and distressing climax of 2008's "The Strangers." 

The film doesn't know what it's trying to say, what its own rules are or the point of any of this, settling instead on an appealing lead, Tristan Nyby's good cinematography, moody lighting and a bunch of cliches.