In the middle of a snow-swept street, which at night seems wholly abandoned to the chill of twilight, sits a solitary box. This wooden black cube, and the even more abject dark secrets contained therein, is the tantalizing hook of Bryan Bertino’s Vicious. It is in this object, we are warned, awaits a mystery that will seal Dakota Fanning’s fate. And as a strange caller at the door intones, if she does not accept this truth, then she will die that very evening.In an age of high-concept genre metaphors grappling with the weight of mortality, mental illness, or the meaning of God and the Devil, the box and the film which it anchors position themselves as a meaty parable eager to say something of import. And yet, after 98 minutes in their company at this year’s Fantastic Fest, the biggest mystery might be how hollow and threadbare the interior life is on such a handsome film.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Bertino certainly has his talents on display in the film. In a previous decade, he even masterminded the cult standard for home invasion thrillers when he wrote and directed The Strangers—a film they keep attempting to redo but never match, including via Renny Harlin’s truly dire The Strangers – Chapter 2 (which also assaulted Austinites at Fantastic Fest this past weekend). Vicious, by contrast, actually has some notes of merit.The atmosphere is bleakly oppressive in its wintry hews and hushed performances, chief among them being the elder Fanning sister, who is overdue for a plumb adult role in genre or otherwise. She is compellingly terrified here, too, as a thirtysomething ne’er-do-well who never really found a place in this life beyond the old decaying home of a grandparent. She was trapped there long before a terrific, if all too briefly used, Kathryn Hunter shows up as the caller in the night. Why Hunter picked this woman’s house and feels the need to bequeath Fanning the mystery box is not immediately clear, but it draws the viewer in as much as Bertino’s terse sound design. The filmmakers use the solitude of an empty house to bear down on the viewer, which in turn makes the sudden audible presence of a seeming spirit from the box all the more stark.At least it seems to be a spirit. The mechanics of the supernatural sorcery at play are deliberately opaque in Vicious, and fair enough. The unknown is part and parcel for any good Yuletide ghost story, but whatever the shape of the entity that comes to bedevil our heroine in the film, its games ultimately prove as toothless and mundane as a Sunday school recital of Ebeneezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.Eventually Fanning’s heroine learns from spectral prank callers on her landline that she is expected to surrender “something you hate, something you need, and something you love” into the box. The box and spirit(s) have enough omnipotent power to know her entire life story, as well the true desires of her id and superego, both. If they deem her a liar, increasingly cruel jump scares and mind games are meted out. If she puts something in the box correctly, it vanishes into the netherworld.On paper, the premise intrigues. But in execution, it more often infuriates and later exhausts. Bertino, Fanning, and a slew of gifted collaborators fervently scurry between set pieces with the affectation of storytellers determined to proclaim something profound or (that most dreaded of words among genre aficionados) elevated in the horror space. But for all the profundity of its pretty wrappings, this holiday gift is barren beneath; a deeper truth that one suspects Paramount Pictures is acutely aware of since a chiller clearly earmarked for the holiday season corridor appears now to be getting low-key dumped in October’s oversaturated horror market.Vicious ultimately (and maybe even intentionally) lives up to its title: it is needlessly cruel since it offers nothing of merit beyond the sight of a movie star like Dakota Fanning subjecting her body to self-harm games that wouldn’t look out of place among the most nihilistic sequences of Saw. Except, ironically, the better Saw movies actually found meaning, hamhanded though it might often be, behind all the gore and ghoulishness. Vicious is just a ghoul with better acting.Vicious premieres on Paramount+ on Oct. 10.The post Vicious Review: Dakota Fanning Discovers Horror in Holiday Box appeared first on Den of Geek.