Vicious

Bryan Bertino returns to the haunted domestic spaces that made him famous, and in Vicious, he transforms the simplest of scenarios into a veritable pressure cooker: a woman, a house, a winter night, and a black box that demands a toll—something you hate, something you need, something you love—before the hourglass runs out. Following in the footsteps of The Strangers and The Dark and the Wicked, Bryan Bertino's new film functions as a ritual you instinctively recognize, even if you pray you never have to participate in it. The more the box speaks—in phone calls that know too much, in double mirrors that move with a breath's delay—the more the film insists on horror's oldest truth: rules are only there to expose the lies we tell ourselves. The effect is cruel, intimate, and disarmingly simple, a chamber piece that treats a living room like a confessional and a coffee table like an altar.

At the center is Dakota Fanning, who delivers a nearly solitary performance, never pushing herself forward but constantly tightening the noose. She traces Polly's descent from depressive drift to savage resourcefulness with almost musical control: the monotonous cadence of ignored voicemails, the fragile courtesy offered to a stranger late at night, the little jolts when a familiar voice uses an old nickname she shouldn't know. When the box rejects her initial rationalizations, when hate, need, and love cease to behave like clear categories and begin to behave like electric wires, Dakota Fanning lets the character think on screen, testing the curse like a chess opponent before overturning the chessboard. The performance is as physical as anything in contemporary horror—there's blood, glass, and teeth—but it's the inner specificity that lingers: the way shame turns to stubbornness, then to a survival instinct that refuses to flatter her.

The messenger at the door is Kathryn Hunter, and she is deployed like a whispered rumor, half warning, half bearer of a curse. Her entrance, all the warmth of tea turning into ritual authority with the line “I'm going to start now,” is an instant thrill that the film continues to exploit for the next ninety minutes. Around Polly, Bryan Bertino draws an effective constellation: the anxious mother (Mary McCormack), the owner sister (Rachel Blanchard), the beloved niece (Emily Mitchell), and the neighbors (Klea Scott and Devyn Nekoda) who turn this strict instruction not to seek help into a moral thorn. These characters are sketched with economical strokes, but they matter; the boxed-in categories only work because the faces, obligations, and old grudges give them weight. When the story plays with the possibility that “something you love” might have a beating heart, the temperature in the room drops.

Formally, the film is as tactile as a splinter. Production designer Jennifer Spence gives Polly's house the autobiography of disorder—half gallery, half junk drawer—so that every mirror and every stack of dishes becomes a narrative trigger. Cinematographer Tristan Nyby bathes the space in wintry amber tones and bruised shadows, making the home accusatory rather than comfortable, while floor-to-ceiling mirrors function as portals to your worst inner monologues. The sound design is literally vicious (phones buzzing with intimate malice, floors altering your breathing), and the practical effects pierce with credible, unpleasant force; even the simple image of Kathryn Hunter, stuck in the middle of the street with a confession—the worst thing I've ever done—marks you like a bruise you can't stop touching.

Thematically, Vicious is part of a conversation that stretches from Richard Matheson's Button, Button to Richard Kelly's The Box: three choices, a countdown, a moral calculation. But where those works rely on cause and effect, Bryan Bertino relies on emotional truth. The logic of the curse is intentionally elastic; what remains constant is how the box tests rationalization. Hate, need, love: words that seem clear on paper crumble under the weight of questions at 2 a.m. Some will be irritated by this elasticity and a third act that borders on overkill; there are moments when the film could turn the hourglass back to black, but instead chooses to sprinkle more sand. Yet even when the plot architecture falters, the experiential thread holds firm: the device behaves like an algorithm trained on the contradictions of a single psyche, and the ambiguity feels less like evasion than ethics. Depression rarely offers an orderly cosmology; Vicious respects this disorder while sculpting a touch of grace without betraying the cruelty that preceded it.

If The Strangers distilled terror into the phrase “because you were at home,” this one asks what accumulates because you stayed—because stasis has calcified into identity and now something wants a tribute for all the evenings traded for cigarettes and a song you played too often. With Dakota Fanning as its pillar, Kathryn Hunter spellbinding, and Jennifer Spence and Tristan Nyby etching a house you can smell, the film earns its title without confusing nihilism with depth. It's a brutal film, but one that listens; it's cruel, but not careless. The rules fray and the ending lingers a little too long, but its best moments are imbued with a rare and uncomfortable honesty that follows you out of the theater and into the quiet of the night. In short: a fierce and intimate winter horror film that hits close to home and leaves a mark.

Vicious
Written and directed by Bryan Bertino
Produced by Richard Suckle
Starring Dakota Fanning, Kathryn Hunter, Mary McCormack, Rachel Blanchard, Devyn Nekoda
Cinematography: Tristan Nyby
Edited by Tad Dennis
Music by Tom Schraeder
Production company: Atlas Independent
Distributed by Paramount Pictures (Paramount+)
Release dates: September 19, 2025 (Fantastic Fest), October 10, 2025 (United States, France)
Running time: 102 minutes

Seen on October 8, 2025 (Screamfest 2025 press screener)

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