Bryan Bertino once emerged as a rare craftsman of contemporary horror who understood that fear is not a loud instrument. It is a note that resonates in the body. He built that note, held it, sustained it across quiet rooms and uncertain nights, and the echo left people rattled. The Strangers arrived years ago and gave viewers the kind of cold terror that lives at the center of a common human worry. What if the walls do not protect. What if the door is not a boundary. What if the night keeps coming and it knows the address.

There was a feeling after The Dark and the Wicked that Bertino had refined that instinct even more. He brought grief, mortality, and faithless dread into a farmhouse and stripped every gesture of safety away. That film turned family sorrow into a kind of fog that seeped into the floorboards and made the air untrustworthy. It did not shout its horror. It murmured until the mind was unsure of what it was hearing. That was the great power of the movie. It simply put the audience in a space where the figures in the corners and the memory of an old voice felt like proof that more exists just outside the edge of ordinary life.

Now comes Vicious. If one were to describe it in a single thread, it is a spiritual sibling to that earlier work. It wants to touch the same nerves about isolation and the mind and the quiet pull of despair. It offers a compelling premise that is easy to summarize but tricky to live inside. It has a central performance from Dakota Fanning that feels deeply committed and fully exposed. It also has a director who still knows how to point a camera at a room and create pressure out of the emptiness. And yet, despite all of that, the movie gets tangled in tone and theme. It cannot quite decide what it wants its fear to mean. It lunges for the audience with loud accents and sharp stings more often than it earns their breathless attention through mood. The movie is not a misfire. It is a struggle between a gifted filmmaker’s steady instincts and a script that will not sit still long enough to be honest.

Winter, a door, and a stranger who knows the rules

The movie introduces Polly, played by Dakota Fanning, who is thirty two and haunted by silence. Her life feels unmoored. The information arrives in practical ways. There are messages from people who have given up on patience. A boss who sounds more annoyed than kind. A mother whose voice is tired and worried. A space that looks like a home but feels empty in a way that a person can hear. The house is large and full of dark corners, and the winter outside seems to be creeping in through every seam. It is the sort of night when most people do not answer the door.

Polly does. On the other side is an older woman who looks lost and speaks with gentle composure. She says she is looking for her son’s place and needs help. Her presence is so soft that it disarms caution. Tea is made. Conversation is polite. The sort of kindness that most of us hope is still possible between strangers unfolds quietly. Then the woman places a small black box on the coffee table and says five words that are cold in their certainty. I am going to start now.

The box is simple. There is an hourglass inside. The instructions, if they can be called that, are disturbingly neat. Polly must place three items within. One that she hates. One that she needs. One that she loves. And with that strange task set like a fuse, the older woman departs. The world closes in. Time has started, in more ways than one.

An object that turns the room into a confession booth

On the surface the box is a device for a horror plot. In practice it works like a trap for lies. It tests the distance between what a person says and what a person knows in private. When Polly tries to put her cigarettes under the word hate, the box pushes back. That simple act is telling. She wants to hate them because she knows the world expects it. But she does not. That gap between performance and truth becomes a recurring line that the movie keeps drawing on the floor. The box is not magic in the way we usually mean. It is moral in a way that feels invasive. It wants to sort a human life into categories of love and need and disdain with no wiggle room and very little grace.

Of course, the room does not stay quiet. The film sends voices toward Polly from places that should be silent. A call from a father who is not living becomes a terrible nudge. A voice that pretends to be her mother is sharper and crueler than any memory of care. The house answers the phone when it wants to. The presence of watchers is implied rather than proven. A woman who thought she was alone now has company she cannot invite to leave.

If the box is a symbol of anything, it could be the rules of despair. It is the mind telling itself there is only one honest way to sort the world. Put the truth in this container. Admit what is loved. Admit what is needed. Admit what is hated. Now face the price. It is a brutal thing to ask a person on a lonely winter night. The film wants to stare at that brutality until it reveals something difficult and useful. Sometimes it does. Other times the spell breaks and the movie moves on before the thought can settle.

A story that presses on mental illness without saying its name too often

There is no reason to dance around what the images and the behavior suggest. Vicious has its eyes on thoughts that are not safe. It stares into the idea of a person who cannot see many reasons to continue except for a few delicate ties that are still glowing somewhere in the distance. It pushes against rituals of self harm in a way that feels honest but also intentionally provocative. The film is not a clinical study. It is more a fever dream about a state of mind that feels like a trap. When it works, the simple setup serves a larger purpose. It is a portrait of someone who is being forced to admit what truly matters under merciless conditions.

There is a clarity that comes with the quiet moments of the film. The image of a woman alone in a house with a box that knows when she is lying has power. The more the script tries to describe the rules of how the unseen forces work, the less convincing it becomes. That is the tradeoff at the heart of this type of story. The line between supernatural menace and psychological metaphor is thin. Walk it with patience and the meaning arrives on its own. Explain it hastily and the air escapes.

Dakota Fanning holds the center with grit and restraint

Films like this rest almost entirely on the lead. Dakota Fanning does not play Polly as a figure of melodrama. She plays her as a person who has already been tired for a long time. There is a flatness in her voice at times that is not dullness. It is a sign of someone who speaks when necessary and otherwise reserves energy. When fear arrives she never oversells the reaction. She registers it and fights it in ways that feel lived in and real. Many scenes put Fanning in conversations where the other half of the exchange is not visible, and she still finds rhythm and a human scale. It is not easy to carry a film that repeatedly drags the character through confusion, panic, and resignation. She absorbs it and gives the audience a consistent person to hold onto even when the story is firing noise instead of ideas.

It helps that Bertino knows how to place a figure in a frame. He builds corners into threats and leaves doors open just enough for the eyes to wander. He slows down the camera so that the viewer’s mind starts to populate the edges with movement. Those are the director’s strengths, and they make Fanning’s performance even more potent. The camera does not need her to scream constantly to convince the viewer that she is afraid. It needs her to look at a hallway like it is the beginning of a thought that might break something inside her. She can do that.

The difficulty of tone and the easy pull of loud tricks

The film’s main problem is not technical or performative. It is tonal. The finest stretches of Bertino’s earlier work have an almost stubborn patience. They let time do the violence. They let the absence of answers create the panic. Vicious has sequences that remember this and feel chilling. Then it shifts gears and reaches for jolts. Sudden noises. Aggressive sound design. Startle tactics that can be effective in the moment but leave no residue.

Horror can certainly use those tools. The question is whether those bursts mean anything inside the movie’s larger idea. Here the balance is off. The film begins with a fascinating promise. A box that only accepts honest offerings. A woman who does not know what she truly needs. A night that might be asking her to choose life again and to prove it with objects. Then the story keeps breaking its own trance with short term shocks. The result is a loss of momentum. The fear becomes scattered rather than cumulative. The audience feels pushed around rather than drawn into understanding.

When the script under explains and over asserts

Ambiguity has a strange reputation. People talk about it like it is either lazy or brilliant. Really, it depends on whether the ambiguity sits on top of a clear emotional argument. The Strangers worked not because it solved anything but because it never pretended it would. The certainty of danger and the arbitrariness of cruelty were the point. The Dark and the Wicked played with faith and evil but always kept its focus on grief and helpless love. Vicious wants to be elusive in a similar way. The problem is that it introduces rules and symbols and then withholds the connective meaning that would make them land. The ending hints that the box is not finished with its cruel game and rolls credits without answering questions that the film itself has raised. The confusion does not feel like a feature. It feels like a shrug.

If the story had maintained its narrower focus and stayed inside Polly’s internal struggle to define hate and need and love, the ambiguity could have remained a virtue. Viewers can live with not knowing who sent the box or why the voices call. They have a harder time living with a film that does not seem to know what it wants the choice to mean. It is not that every theme must be spelled out. It is that every major element should serve the same central question. What is this woman fighting for. What would it mean to win. What would it mean to lose. When the movie focuses, those questions flare. When it wanders into jump scare loops, they fade.

A place within a distinctive career

Bryan Bertino has given the genre some of its most enduring modern images. Masked intruders lingering in doorways with no motive. A barn heard long before it is seen and goats that know something has seeped across the land. A small house where a mother and a daughter hear something hungry moving just beyond the reach of headlights. He has always liked contained spaces and pairs or trios of characters whose relationships carry as much tension as the external forces. He also tends to use grief, addiction, guilt, and regret as engines. His films feel like little pressure cookers where the heat of human frailty makes the steam whistle.

Vicious wants to sit beside The Dark and the Wicked as a companion piece. Both hold a family member in an isolated location and strip away the normal social world until a single mind bears the full brunt of despair. The earlier film is more cohesive. It has a relentless sense of purpose. Death in the house is not only a plot device. It is a condition that saturates everything and transforms love into helpless devotion. Vicious is more of a puzzle box that keeps rearranging the pieces. When it stops moving, a shape almost appears. But because it keeps fiddling, the shape blurs again.

The choice of Dakota Fanning signals ambition. Asking an actor to anchor a mostly solitary descent means the director trusts the camera to live on her face. That trust is rewarded. Her performance provides continuity when the screenplay does not. Kathryn Hunter’s short appearance bends the tone early with surgical precision. Those few minutes define a larger promise the film is trying to keep. If one were to imagine the ideal version of this story, it would probably spend more time in the stillness after the older woman leaves and less time announcing that something spooky just occurred.

What the film says about need, love, hate, and the lies we tell to get through the day

The most interesting moral thread is the idea that a person might try to put an item in the hate category that does not belong there. That act is not just about cigarettes. It is about all of the ways humans pretend to despise things that actually mostly soothe them. It is easy to say that a habit is disgusting. It is hard to admit that it provides comfort during empty hours. It is common to declare that one does not need anyone. It is more honest to admit that certain voices in the phone are the only ones that keep the worst ideas from coming too close. The film is at its best when it treats the box as a harsh therapist that does not accept false answers.

There is an equally rich avenue in the love category. What counts as love that will keep a person alive through the night. Family is a complicated answer. Romance is not present here. A niece seems to be the one source of light that stays bright in Polly’s mind. That feels correct. Sometimes the person who holds someone to the world is a small child who does not even know they are doing it. The film returns to this point in a way that resonates, but again, it could have quietly let that chord ring longer.

Craft, sound, framing, and how dread is built when patience is allowed

Bryan Bertino knows how to compose shots where the background is a second scene unfolding in silence. He places a figure in the foreground and then lets the negative space murmur. He understands that a hallway can be a character when the light is faint and the end cannot be seen. The sound work often follows the same rule. A creak to the left may not be a cue for a jump but a provocation for the mind to invent a shape. When the movie sticks to that discipline, it becomes oppressive in the right way.

The problem is not that the sound design is aggressive. It is that the aggressiveness is sometimes used as punctuation for moments that have not been set up with enough sentence. A jolt has more meaning when the audience has been bearing quiet for a while and the interruption is a true violation. Too many fast scares reset the nervous system. After a while, it becomes a rhythm like any other. Viewers start to expect the crash and the shriek and wait for it instead of fearing it. The spell breaks. It is difficult because the temptation is always there. Loud works quickly. Quiet takes faith.

The ending that gestures instead of concluding

There is a touch of cruelty in the final moments that suggests the black box will continue its harassment beyond the borders of the story. The note is a nod to the idea that certain torments do not end with dawn. In isolation, that is a worthy ending. In context, it lands with less force because the film has not fully clarified the emotional contract it made with the audience. If Polly has passed a test, what was the measure. If she has failed, what was the rule. If the point is that the test itself is monstrous and no human being should be asked to divide their life into three offerings under threat, then the film could have allowed that to sting more directly. Instead, it leaves the viewer with a feeling that the writer stayed on the fence when commitment was needed.

What could have elevated the film

It is not hard to picture a version of Vicious that stands with the strongest work in this director’s career. A few small shifts would have rippled through the entire experience.

• Fewer external rules and more internal honesty. The less the movie explains the mechanics, the more the box can act as a mirror.
  
• Longer silences between intrusions. Give the audience room to sit with the choices before the next noise storms in.
  
• Clearer emotional stakes for each category. If hate is about self loathing, need is about survival, and love is about reason to live, then each offering could have been staged as a ritual with weight.
  
• Let the older woman return only once, or not at all. Her authority is strongest when she is a memory with a voice.
  
• Narrow the climax to a single decisive act. Offer one choice that cannot be undone and make the cost unmistakable.
  

These are directional thoughts rather than demands. The film as made has its own identity. But the above changes align with what the story keeps hinting it wants to be.

Where this leaves Bryan Bertino as an artist of fear

Careers are not straight lines. They wobble. They test their own limits. Vicious feels like a test that did not quite reach its intended shape. That is not a reason to turn away from what Bertino is trying to do. It is a reason to hope he trusts his slower instincts even more next time. He has a gift for quiet devastation. He has an eye for the angle that makes a wall look like a threat. He has a way of writing rooms where the air is heavy with a feeling that nobody wants to name. When he builds the story on those foundations and refuses the easy noise, the result is deep and lasting.

Even here, the craft keeps surfacing. The opening passage with the older woman is clean and chilling. The phone calls ride the edge between supernatural menace and psychological breakdown effectively. Dakota Fanning holds the film together with a human performance that would play even without the genre trappings. Kathryn Hunter’s presence bends the entire tone of the night with a few simple lines and a calm that is terrifying. Those pieces matter. They will linger.

Final thoughts on the film’s meaning and experience

Vicious presents a simple proposition. A night in a house. A visitor with a box. Three words that will define a life. Hate. Need. Love. A person trying to be honest about what those mean under pressure. The film does not always trust its own elegance. It throws louder events at the screen when it could have pressed down on the quieter agony. It introduces more mystery than it is willing to resolve and then closes with a gesture rather than an answer. And yet, inside the noise is a truthful idea. The hardest fights happen in silence. The most dangerous lies are the ones told to oneself. The most powerful reason to go on is often a small person who will not understand the gift that was given to them for many years.

If one were to recommend the film, it would be with a caveat. Go for the performances and the early tension. Expect to be startled. Prepare for beauty in some of the framing and disappointment in some of the choices. If one were to recommend Bertino’s body of work, it would be with conviction. He remains one of the artists in this space who respects fear and understands that the mind is a more powerful theater than any jump in volume can provide. Vicious may not stand at the top of his efforts, but it continues a conversation he has been having with audiences for years. What is the shape of loneliness. How does grief bend time. What does love mean when there is almost no light left. Those are questions worth asking again, even when the answers are incomplete.

There is a line of thought that horror, at its best, is not about monsters chasing people up stairs. It is about the secret conviction that something inside will betray a person at the worst possible moment. That is the spirit that Vicious touches. That is also the spirit it sometimes loses when the sounds rise. The hope is that the next film listens to the quiet a little longer. The silence is where Bryan Bertino has always found the truest terror.