My Thoughts on Vicious
Bryan Bertino has always had a knack for turning the familiar into something frightening, where in The Strangers and The Dark and the Wicked, he took quiet, domestic spaces and filled them with plenty of unease, and his new film, Vicious, goes down a similar path.
The film begins with Polly (Dakota Fanning), living alone in a big, empty house that she rents from her sister, where she’s just going through the motions of her life, before knock on the door happens with an elderly woman standing outside.
The woman places a small wooden box and an hourglass on the table, and there’s no dramatic music, no jump scare, just an odd pause as she tells Polly that she will die tonight, and after the woman leaves, the strange events begin.
It’s a classic horror idea to be fair, nothing new or original, but the execution works because of Dakota Fanning (The Watchers), who carries the movie almost entirely on her own, where she nails that balance between fear and fatigue, but around the halfway point, the movie starts to repeat itself a bit too much.
The same pattern of quiet build-up, sudden scare, then another stretch of silence, and while it’s not bad, it starts to feel fairly predictable, and the pacing becomes uneven with moments of great tension followed by scenes that drag too long.
What kept me watching though wasn’t the plot, but the mood - that heavy, suffocating dread that Bertino does so well - with a certain sadness running through everything, and even when the film isn’t scary, it’s sometimes unsettling in a quieter way, as if the horror is just a reflection of how lost Polly already was before anything supernatural showed up.
Vicious is a very flawed movie, but it’s also quite atmospheric at times, and it’s the kind of film that shows how much Bertino understands fear as an emotion, so I respected what it was trying to do, and while it may not reach the precision or power of The Dark and the Wicked, it at least feels like it comes from an honest place, even if it does just drift along and become quite repetitive.
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