DAKOTA Fanning is the best thing about Vicious, a box of unearthly delights, that the lid is probably best kept closed on.
This dishcloth grey swill is the kind of horror film made by the big film companies for people who don’t actually like horror films. It is executed well enough, but pedestrian, languorous, and unoriginal with it. The nighttime mood is spot on, with low-lit rooms and blankets of snow on moonlit suburban streets with neither character nor menace to wake its unperturbed residents from their joyless slumber. It feels more like a dewy-eyed Christmas commercial than the stuff of nightmares.
Safe as houses, the atmosphere is way more conducive to curling up and having a dose, than it is to quaking in your fur-lined suede slippers at its muted attempts at consternation. I’ve seen scarier episodes of A Prayer Before Bedtime.
The film opens with Polly (Fanning), and her night going bump when she receives a mysterious box from an unexpected late-night visitor, that alas, as luck would have it, isn’t the Milk Tray man. The mysterious box comes with a simple instruction: place three things inside: something you need, something you hate, and something you love.
It all sounds simple enough, but soon what begins as a strange ritual quickly unravels into “a waking nightmare”. Well, that’s if you buy the auld spiel from Paramount. I clearly saw the Christmas chocolate box version of Vicious, where the scariest thing about it is the anxiety-inducing puss of the Charlotte’s Web star.
“Trapped in a terrifying world where reality bends and memory betrays, Polly must navigate a series of impossible choices. As time slips away, she’s forced to confront the darkness not just around her, but within her – before it consumes everything and everyone she’s ever known.” Again, Paramount, are talking out their backsides.
Bryan Bertino’s latest film is bewildering at best – underdeveloped, overacted, and a real disappointment. Vicious is more a box full of ordinariness than a box full of darkness.
(2/5)