If I’ve learned anything from watching Bryan Bertino movies it’s that I should never, ever open my door. For anybody. Sorry, trick ‘r treaters, you’ll have to ply your trade elsewhere. Sorry, pizza delivery person, I’m not falling for that old gag. Sorry, Publisher’s Clearing House, I don’t need a million dollars that badly … Wait! No! I was kidding! It was just an opening paragraph gag, I… aw, dang it. Thanks, Bryan Bertino. Thanks a bunch.
Well, I just lost a million dollars and I’m feeling blue, so let’s talk about “Vicious,” Bertino’s latest horror movie about being blue, which also presumably cost some money. You may remember Bertino as the writer/director of “The Strangers” — the good one from 2008, not the Renny Harlin reboots. In “The Strangers,” a marriage proposal goes wrong, so Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman are bitter and miserable, which was bad enough even before the masked murderers arrived. Literal insult met literal injury. And why did they attack our heavy-hearted heroes in the first place? No reason. Just because they were home.
“Vicious” kicks off in a similar way, with Dakota Fanning as Polly, a 30something lifelong loser. She’s alone in her house, at night, and she’s down in the dumps. Then there’s a knock at the door — never a good sign (except when it’s Publisher’s Clearing House) — so Polly opens it and sees Kathryn Hunter, with a freshly amputated finger, holding a creepy box, asking to come inside. Polly, who can’t tell a red flag from a plate of mac ‘n’ cheese, invites her in, and the old lady says a bunch of weird stuff about how Polly is going to die. Also the creepy box belongs to her now. Byyyye!
This creepy box is, of course, super creepy. It torments Polly with sinister voices and screaming, ghoulish ghosts. The only way to stop it, and to prevent the tormentors from killing her family, is to feed the box three things: Something she hates, something she needs, and something she loves. But the box can tell when she’s lying, so if she doesn’t actually hate, need or love whatever she puts in there, the consequences will be bad.
If you’re going to make a movie where 90% of the action is just one person in a house, working themselves into a tizzy, you’d better find the right actor or your movie will be unwatchable. Dakota Fanning is the right actor. She’s so raw you can damn near see her nerve-endings. Polly isn’t a terribly complicated person and her problems aren’t particularly interesting, but Fanning mines that everyday familiarity for all its worth. So she can’t get her life together. So she doesn’t really know what she wants or what really matters to her. Who can’t relate to that? Now she’s got to figure it out while being taunted by demons, with her sanity and her life on the line. And the clock is ticking, in the form of an eerie hourglass.
Watching Fanning flail while trying, desperately, to figure her life out is distressing, because Bertino is forcing us to ask the same things. Getting attacked by ghosts isn’t special, so he’s added an interactive element that excites our imaginations. How would we survive in this scenario? What do we actually hate, need and love, and how could we shove any of those things into a box without dismembering them. Or is that the point, that to save our own lives we sometimes have to value our own needs above others?
Decyphering the point of “Vicious” is an annoying little exercise, because as the movie unfolds the themes fall out of focus. Is this a case of supernatural divine intervention, where Polly runs through a gruesome gauntlet in a perverse attempt to get her life on track? Or is this ordeal her punishment for wasting that life so far? Is this all a metaphor for mental illness, and if so, is it a productive metaphor or just an excuse for jump scares? Or, since “Vicious” takes place at Christmastime, is it nothing more than a clunky riff on seasonal depression?
As a film about a woman spending, again, 90% of her time alone in a house, I can’t in good conscience reveal enough about what happens to answer those questions for you, because there wouldn’t be much left for the movie to reveal on its own. Then again I’m not entirely sure the movie has the answers. It’s like a junk drawer: If you go searching you’ll find something interesting, but if it was useful it would probably be somewhere else.
Bertino’s intentions may be obtuse, and annoyingly so, but he knows how to freak us out. He builds tension until it’s unbearable, and makes his audience feel like escape may actually be impossible; an atmosphere of unyielding dread that many horror filmmakers strive for, and few achieve. He can’t resist the urge to take cheap shots that dull “Vicious’s” impact — dead people jumping out of closets, yawn — but that doesn’t ruin his film, it just sullies it a little. Bertino and Fanning are deeply committed to going to dark places, and they take us along for their freaky little ride. Whether it makes sense or not. (Probably not.)
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