A strange ritual soon unravels into a waking nightmare when a woman receives a mysterious box that comes with instructions to place three things inside: something you need, something you hate, and something you love. A film by Bryan Bertino, starring Dakota Fanning, Mary McCormack, Rachel Blanchard, Devyn Nekoda, Klea Scott, Emily Mitchell, and Kathryn Hunter.
VICIOUS
Bryan Bertino
(2025)
Polly Gibbons (Dakota Fanning) is a struggling artist who lives alone in a big house. She’s been withdrawing lately. She hasn’t shown up to pottery class in weeks, even though she paid in advance. Her voicemail keeps filling up: Ryan from the studio checking if she wants to put her membership on hold. Lennie reminding her about picking up that cake on Thursday like she said she would. Her boss Bobby saying she absolutely has to work a double tomorrow. And her mom, wondering why she’s been ignoring her texts and offering to help her practice for some interview.
After a while of eating on the couch and scrolling through Instagram, liking photos of her niece, Polly starts running through her art school interview alone. She mumbles that she did well in school, that people think she’s smart, but maybe they were wrong. Maybe she isn’t actually that smart. She tells the empty room she’s a hard worker, just got distracted. Later that evening, someone rings the doorbell.
Curious who’d be visiting this late, Polly answers the door and finds an old woman (Kathryn Hunter) standing on her porch. The woman seems disoriented and flinches slightly when she sees Polly. She says she thought someone she knew used to live here. A cab brought her, she explains, and her son’s number is on the fridge if she needs to call anyone. Polly notices her trembling from the cold and invites her in.
In the living room, Polly offers to make tea. The camera lingers on the old woman’s injured hand. Two fingers are missing, though Polly doesn’t seem to notice. The woman thanks her for being so kind, then begins asking personal questions. Is she married? Any children? When the woman mentions the house seems too big for someone so young, Polly explains that it actually belongs to her sister, who’s renting it to her cheap since she and her husband moved to the other side of town with their daughter.
Polly tenses up when the old woman suddenly pulls a black wooden box from her suitcase and places it on the coffee table. The woman announces it belongs to Polly now and opens it. She lifts out an hourglass, sets it down, and tells Polly she’s going to die tonight. But instead of explaining what needs to happen or what the rules are, the woman only says vaguely that Polly has to do things. Disturbed, Polly shoves the hourglass back into the box and orders the woman out of her house. The woman keeps insisting the box is Polly’s now, that she needs it, but Polly refuses to listen.
After the woman leaves, Polly calls her mom and tells her about the bizarre visit, how this old woman showed up and said she was going to die. While on the phone, Polly steps outside and spots the box in the middle of the road.
In her bedroom later, Polly jumps when someone calls her name from behind. She whips around. Nothing. Shaken, she rushes downstairs just as her mom calls again. Polly says she could’ve sworn her mom was upstairs just now, that she heard her voice, even smelled her perfume. A moment later, Polly’s heart drops. The wooden box is sitting on her coffee table. She picks up the hourglass and tells her mom the sand isn’t falling. Her mom’s voice answers that it’s because she hasn’t started it yet. Then the voice admits it isn’t her mother. It laughs, cold and cruel, and repeats that Polly is going to die. Three things need to go in the box, the voice says: “something you hate, something you need, and something you love.”
Written and directed by American filmmaker Bryan Bertino, VICIOUS is a horror film following a struggling artist who’s given a mysterious box by a strange old woman, triggering a series of terrifying supernatural events.
While Dakota Fanning does what she can with the role, I never felt connected to her character. Her choices don’t make sense, which makes it tough to care whether she survives. The premise has potential, but the script feels uneven and relies too much on lazy jumpscares.
It’s essentially a pass-it-on curse story that stays annoyingly ambiguous. I spent most of the film unsure if the protagonist was losing her mind or if something supernatural was actually tormenting her. In one scene, Polly finds herself trapped in the house, unable to get out or even smash through a window, like the entire place is sealed by some kind of dark force.
Just when I thought maybe it was all in her head, hallucinations stemming from grief over losing her father to terminal illness, things get even messier. The entity pretends to be her father but calls her on the phone, even though it can apparently take physical form. In the final act, everyone the protagonist thought was dead, supposedly killed by the entity, turns out to be alive and fine. Is this an alternate reality? Did everything reset because she passed the box to someone else? What happened to the old woman? Did Polly just leave her body in the house? What does any of it mean?
VICIOUS feels like an ambitious attempt at creating something unsettling and inexplicable, but without any foundation or clear rules, the film just seems directionless. I never knew what to expect or what this evil entity actually wanted. If it just needs another victim, then what’s the point of the whole box ritual? Why make her put things inside it?
VICIOUS premiered at Fantastic Fest on 19 September 2025. The film was released on Paramount+ on 10 October and was simultaneously made available on VOD on the same day.
