Dakota Fanning’s ‘Vicious’ Fatally Flubs a Killer Premise

Polly acquires a mysterious box. In this box, she must put three things: something she hates, something she needs, and something she loves. That’s the basic premise of Vicious, the new film from writer-director Bryan Bertino (The Strangers)^[1] starring Dakota Fanning,^[2] and it’s incredibly alluring. Instantly, it brings to mind a slew of questions. Where did the box come from? How does it work? What happens if you fail to comply? And can a movie actually pay off something so terribly tantalizing?

Well, after seeing Vicious during its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2025^[3], we can answer that last one: no, it cannot pay everything off. In fact, Vicious fails to answer almost every question about its premise, instead haphazardly throwing ideas at a wall that undercut and frustrate. Fanning is excellent, as one might expect, but she’s handcuffed by a killer idea handled horribly.

As Vicious starts, we do get one answer, namely how how Fanning’s character Polly gets the box. Soon after, she learns the rules, but what the film lacks from there is almost everything else. The box is basically its own character; it claims its victim will die if Polly doesn’t comply, but it never quite explains how or why that would happen. Instead, if the box doesn’t like what she’s doing, it literally phones her to explain itself, telling her exactly what it wants her to sacrifice, and it can even lie to her. As a result, all cohesion in the movie goes away. If the box knows what it wants, where’s the drama? Why would we care about any of this if everything is preordained? Why do we need a box at all if this curse can use the phone or TV to terrorize its victims? And if the box can lie, why would anyone trust it?

For the majority of the runtime, we merely watch Polly torture herself with no end in sight. It’s a minor spoiler, but even after she does exactly what the box wants her to do, the movie keeps going, bringing into question if any of this was actually worth it at all. This all might be okay if we had some big, overarching theme about sacrifice or love to consider, but there’s basically nothing there. In the end, the film tries to shoehorn some kind of thematic sentiment, but by that time, we’re so frustrated about how everything can, does, and will change from scene to scene, so it fails to stick.

There is some disgusting gore throughout, and in its best moments, the film allows us to think about what we’d do with the box. But most of the time, that’s when the phone rings, telling Polly exactly what to do, so any of that potential self-reflection or relatability goes away. Instead, we’re left with an excellent lead performance in a maddening movie that never delivers in the way we’d hope.

Vicious had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2025 and will debut on Paramount+ on October 10.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel^[4], Star Wars^[5], and Star Trek^[6] releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV^[7], and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who^[8].