Studio:   Paramount Pictures
Director: Bryan Bertino
Writer:   Bryan Bertino
Producer: Richard Suckle, Bryan Bertino
Stars:    Dakota Fanning, Kathryn Hunter, Mary McCormack, Rachel Blanchard, Devyn Nekoda, Klea Scott, Emily Mitchell

Review Score:

Summary:

A young woman enters a supernatural nightmare after a stranger forces her to take a mysterious box that demands unusual sacrifices.

Synopsis:

Home alone in the house she rents from her sister Lainie Gibbons, who lives across town with her husband Mark and six-year-old daughter Aly, 32-year-old underachiever Polly receives an unexpected knock at the front door. Missing fingers from a recently bandaged hand, the visitor turns out to be an unidentified woman who claims she thought she knew someone who used to live at Polly’s address.

Thinking her confused and possibly distressed due to her age, Polly invites the woman inside. Following casual conversation, the woman pulls out a small wooden box containing an hourglass and tells Polly, “This will be for you now.” The woman then claims Polly will die tonight, and warns her not to tell anyone.

Alarmed, Polly escorts the woman outside and forces her to take the box with her. The woman says, “I thought it was a nightmare, but I didn’t wake up. You won’t wake up.” She also apologizes for giving Polly the box by saying it is the worst thing she has ever done.

Polly calls her mother to discuss the unsettling incident. During their call, Polly sees the box sitting in the street outside. She then has a brief encounter with a ghoul that resembles her mother while trying on outfits for an important job interview the next day.

Polly’s mother seemingly calls back. Polly notices the box inexplicably reappeared on her coffee table. Polly removes the hourglass, but its sand doesn’t fall. Her mother’s voice reveals itself as a supernatural force that taunts Polly about her impending death and having lived an unfulfilling life. Additionally rattled by loud knocks, doorbells, and loud music, Polly is told she will die unless she gives the box something she hates, something she needs, and something she loves.

Having wanted to quit smoking, Polly puts a pack of cigarettes into the box to represent something she hates. The hourglass sands eventually begin falling. Polly spontaneously starts choking until she coughs up a brass key.

With her cellphone suddenly not working, Polly asks a neighbor across the street if she can use her phone to call the police. While Polly waits anxiously in her kitchen, the neighbor becomes possessed by the presence, taunts Polly, then repeatedly stabs herself to death. With her dying words, the neighbor says, “Look what you made me do. No one else can help you. No one ever could.” Polly also sees “don’t you dare” carved into the flesh of the neighbor’s chest.

Polly returns home and pushes the box and hourglass off her table in frustration. The box and hourglass immediately reappear in the same place once Polly momentarily turns away.

Polly receives a phone call from her dead father’s number. Speaking in her father’s voice, the presence tells Polly the cigarettes aren’t something she hates, only something she’s supposed to hate. Her father tells Polly to remember what he lost the day he died.

Using the brass key, Polly unlocks a curio box containing mementos of her father, including a cross necklace he wore in the hospital while suffering from a terminal illness. Polly retrieves the necklace as a symbol of her hate for God, whom she blames for her dad’s death and no longer believes in. Following a brief encounter with her father as a ghoul, Polly places the necklace in the box and it disappears once she reopens the lid.

Polly encounters a doppelganger that continually shouts, “You’re dead” among other taunts from the other side of a mirror. Their standoff concludes with Polly now holding a pair of shears.

Polly’s sister Lainie calls complaining about receiving incessant phone calls from Polly warning about potential harm coming to Polly’s beloved niece Aly. Indicating she sees Polly’s car approaching outside, Lainie ends the phone call despite Polly pleading not to let her inside. Polly tries to leave the house to warn her sister about the entity imitating her, but the front door’s locks continually relock themselves.

Videos of her niece start playing on TV. They quickly turn ominous as they give Polly the idea she needs to cut off a pinky toe. Polly uses the doppelganger’s shears to painfully cut off her toe, which she then places inside the box.

After another brief encounter with a ghoul resembling her mother, Polly sees her toe is still in the box. New videos on the TV as well as her doppelganger in the mirror indicate Polly was tricked. They further suggest she must sacrifice an index finger instead. Polly cuts off her finger and it vanishes inside the box, seemingly satisfying the second condition.

The door unlocks. Polly immediately races across town to her sister’s house only to find Lainie, Lainie’s husband Mark, and Aly seemingly dead in their beds. The box suddenly appears on the floor as numerous phones begin ringing.

Speaking in her niece’s voice over the phone, the presence taunts Polly by saying the deaths are her fault because she chose to sacrifice something she didn’t truly need. Instructed to give the box something she loves, Polly cuts off a lock of her niece’s hair as a symbol of her love for Aly and puts it inside the box.

With the box seemingly satiated, Lainie, Mark, and Aly apparently return to life. However, Aly morphs into a ghoul that stabs Polly in her heart.

Polly suddenly wakes on Lainie’s dining room table. Her nightmare still not over, Polly gives the box jewelry and drops of blood, but the hourglass sands continue falling.

Concluding she needs to pass the box to someone else like it was passed to her, Polly goes to the home of a neighbor down Lainie’s street. In a scene similar to what happened between Polly and the strange woman, Polly tearfully forces the box upon Tara, a young woman visiting her parents for the holidays.

Polly returns to her own house. Covered in blood and now missing an eye, the old woman returns. Thrusting the box toward Polly, the woman says “it” won’t let her go until she kills Polly. The two women engage in a violent fight that ends with Polly using scissors to kill the woman. Among the cryptic things she says with her dying breaths, the woman tells Polly she thinks the box chose them because they are broken people. She also indicates the box and the hourglass sands feed off fear, and Polly shouldn’t be afraid of dying. Polly sees her first encounter with the woman reflected in the mirror, and the woman notices future Polly observing through the glass.

The hourglass sands finally run out, seemingly ending Polly’s experience. Lainie’s family wakes to find their downstairs in a state of disarray Lainie angrily assumes Polly is responsible for. Polly wakes at home to discover the neighbor who stabbed herself is alive and well across the street.

Polly drives to Lainie’s house and embraces her niece with great relief. Polly then goes to check on Tara, whom she gave the box to, but Tara claims she doesn’t recognize Polly or know what box she is talking about. Polly returns to the street where her phone begins buzzing, but she refuses to answer the call.

After Polly leaves, Tara is seen with fingers missing from her hand. “Tell no one. Trust no one. Listen to no one. She lies.” is written in blood on a wall. With her parents lying slaughtered in the background, Tara puts an object in the box and mutters, “something you want.” Her phone begins buzzing.

Review:

The first thing heard in “Vicious” is Dakota Fanning, speaking as her character Polly, intoning a cryptic monologue over a black screen. She begins, “I don’t want to be me. Is that a weird thing to say? It’s true. I’m so tired of feeling like nothing matters.”

The first thing seen in “Vicious” is Fanning’s face, an image you’ll want to get comfortable with if you stick out the 100-minute runtime, because at least 75% of those minutes consist of repeated close-ups on Fanning wearing some variation of a pained expression. She continues, “I try so f*cking hard. I bang my head against the f*cking wall. Every minute. Every second. But nothing changes. It doesn’t get better. I’m still right here. And it’s all the same.” An offscreen voice replies, “What do you want?” Polly responds, “For it to stop.”

Before anyone can wonder what these words might mean, the next sequence shows a window, then a mirror, then a door. The images are inverted, presumably to suggest a sense of disorientation, and slowly spin upright as the camera zooms out while haunting music echoes underneath. Tinkling piano keys escalate into straining orchestration that sounds like it should accompany something far more ominous than ordinary interior design. Finally, the title smashes onscreen as though everything experienced thus far has kicked off a thrilling Conjuring Universe movie and not been a heap of context-lacking creeps offering no concrete clues as to why a viewer should feel unnerved.

Unengaging exposition continues as we formally meet Polly, a deliberately mundane character whose mundane introduction doesn’t seem as deliberate. While unpacking groceries, Polly plays an unusually high number of new voicemails. Her pottery instructor called to remind Polly she hasn’t been showing up for prepaid classes. Her sister wants Polly to remember the cake for her niece’s birthday. Her boss tells Polly she has to work that double tomorrow after all. And Mom asks if Polly printed those forms she needs for an important job interview.

Even though a complete picture of Polly’s unfulfilling life has been quickly painted from four messages, additional shots of wilted plants and dirty dishes conclusively establish Polly as a chronic underachiever whom people generally perceive to be flaky at best and unreliable at worst. Featuring very few actors and only two locations, watching “Vicious” can feel like being a front-row hostage for a one-woman stage show, where that one woman is an underwhelming personality we still have to spend another hour and a half with.

Returning to the well that brought him success with his home invasion hit “The Strangers” (review here), writer/director Bryan Bertino apparently still finds frights in the concept of answering unknown knocks on the front door. Making the same mistake as Liv Tyler, Polly opens her home to an unnamed old woman missing two fingers from one hand. Like Polly, the woman also enjoys muttering riddles, since using the same amount of words in a straightforward fashion would remove all mystery from her bizarre babble. So she gives Polly a wooden box and says things like, “This will be for you now. You’re going to die. I’m sorry, but it’s true. You can be sad, you can be scared, you can be a lot of things, it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t change the truth. You are going to die.”

She could have taken a direct route to the point by instead saying, “you need to give the box something you hate, something you need, and something you love to stop its curse.” But then “Vicious” wouldn’t be able to gradually fill in those blanks via taunting phone calls from a paranormal presence speaking through the voices of Polly’s family members, both living and dead. After all, nothing says eeriness like a little girl cackling through the trope-tastic tinniness of telephone audio.

Thus begins Polly’s slow-burn ordeal of satiating the box’s desires by making sacrifices to save her loved ones. And thus begins the audience’s arduous ordeal of laboring through an onslaught of insert footage where Fanning’s hand, competing with her face for which body part can collect the most screen time, picks up a prop, turns a doorknob, presses a button, lights a cigarette, or opens the box’s lid for the umpteenth time. Not all of the B-roll features Fanning. From shots of pans hanging on a kitchen wall to a lamp in a bedroom corner, there’s also a slew of cutaways with even less discernible narrative purpose.

During one cut to a burning fireplace, I challenged myself to figure out, why did Bertino choose to show this right now? Are the flames reflective of the nightmarish hell Polly now finds herself in? Perhaps he’s hinting at a phoenix-like renewal yet to come should Polly emerge from the ashes of her haunting experience? Or maybe there was no better bridge between equally pointless inclusions of random furniture and household fixtures.

Unless someone has the same phobia about how responding to an unsolicited knock invites danger, or has an odd fascination with watching Dakota Fanning pinch her eyebrows together, I don’t know what target audience would find “Vicious” substantially scary, much less mesmerizing as supernatural suspense. The movie’s vague ruminations on how a disappointing existence struggles to find purpose feel more like empty parallels observed in passing rather than meaningful philosophies on the subject. An outstanding example of “This could have been a half-hour horror anthology episode,” “Vicious” erases potential resonance with inessential stuffing that’s overlong, unnecessarily ambiguous, or just plain boring.

Review Score: 35