VICIOUS (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Vicious, Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 9, 2025

Someone who's vaguely lost in life encounters a vague, supernatural threat in Vicious. Writer/director Bryan Bertino's horror tale is consistent in that way, at least.

The threat is a strange, two-part one. It's a wooden box that contains an hourglass. Anyone given the box needs to give it three things: something that person hates, something the person needs, and something that person loves.

As the box and whatever entity in charge of it don't receive any of those things, the sound in that hourglass pours from top to bottom, counting down with each grain of sand the time when something—whatever that may be—will happen to the unfortunate person in possession of the box. It's strongly suggested that the person will die after failing to give the box everything it wants, but hard and fast rules don't seem to matter to it—or Bertino, for that matter.

Indeed, the filmmaker clearly believes the eerie mystery of his central gimmick is only rule by which he needs to construct this story. There's an implicit argument in that approach, basically assuming that to explain the box and its methods would be to ruin the potential terror of the thing. Bertino is, to be fair, kind of right in presuming that. There's a late scene in which a character speculates why the box and its otherworldly master do what they do, and it does bring the story's climax to a dead halt.

The lack of a clear explanation of what's really happening here, however, does also give the entire thing an air of uncertainty, as well as a more practical sense of that. We meet Polly (Dakota Fanning), who lives alone in a large house given to her by her older sister. It's the only way she'd have such a place, since Polly is currently unemployed and hasn't been able to keep a job for more than a few months, and it's quite convenient for the atmosphere of the movie that does live in such a spacious place.

While Polly sits around not doing much of anything at home, the front doorbell rings in the middle of the night. Standing there is an older woman, played by Kathryn Hunter, who says she lost her way in the neighborhood, remembered that someone she knew once lived in this house, and needs to make a phone call. Since it's late and cold outside, Polly invites the stranger in, makes her some hot tea, and returns to discover that the woman has set up a wooden box and hourglass on the coffee table.

The stranger offers some cryptic ideas about death, before telling Polly that she will tonight—unless she follows some instructions. The woman explains the aforementioned rules, and even though Polly forces her to leave, the stranger leaves the box in the middle of the street outside Polly's house. When she calls her mother (played by Mary McCormack) for advice about what has happened, the voice on the other end of the line reveals that it isn't actually her mother but someone—or something—demanding that Polly do what the older woman told her to.

The rest of the plot is a mostly circular affair, as Polly tries to decipher the riddles of the entity, which keeps calling her or answering her calls to family in disguise, and assorted happenings, most of them visions of people she knows or knew looking quite creepy, repeat themselves. She gets a call, for example, from her father (played by Michael Abbott Jr.), which is especially strange since he died some years ago. That leads Polly to have a moment of admitting that the thing she hates is faith in some higher power.

That might be the most specific character detail here, which isn't saying much in the first place but feels more sincere than anything else the box throws at her. When it comes to what she needs (There's an argument to be made that anything she puts in the box is, technically, nothing she actually "needs," but neither the box nor Bertino has considered that logic, apparently), the resulting sequence is a couple bloody acts of self-mutilation. There's a darkly amusing suggestion that the box's master is toying with Polly, showing her a video of a kid singing a nursery rhyme as a clue but rejecting the thing she puts in the box anyway.

The kid, by the way, is Polly's niece (played by Emily Mitchell), the only daughter of her older sister (played by Rachel Blanchard). By the time Polly is able to get out of the house to check on her family (The entity keeps locking the doors as soon as Polly unlocks them), the movie has played so many games with what's real and what isn't that it doesn't feel worthwhile to care much about where any of this heading. It can all change on the spot, after all.

The main problem is that Vicious loses its focus on who this character is and what about her makes her a target of this wicked game. Without that, the movie just becomes a game with unclear rules and a payoff that takes a long time to explain very little of consequence.

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