Every now and then, Hollywood comes across a hit that can’t be neatly replicated, a one-off success story that should be praised, noted and promptly left well alone. The Strangers wasn’t supposed to do all that much back in 2008, released almost two years after it was made on the cheap, pushed around the schedule like it was toxic waste. But it was a surprise summer sleeper, making almost 10 times its budget and quickly entering the horror iconography hall of fame, with its nightmarishly mismatched masked villains and the chillingly hollow “Because you were home” non-explanation.
A tortured decade of stop-start attempts to make a follow-up finally resulted in 2018’s underwhelming remix The Strangers: Prey at Night, a sequel entirely devoid of the clammy tension that made the original so unbearably effective. That really should have been the last hurrah but, inevitably it was not, a three-part reboot kicking off last year with The Strangers: Chapter 1, a rubbishy Slovakia-filmed do-over only outdone for head-smashing pointlessness by its sequel, which flopped in and out of cinemas last month (I would expect the third to go straight to streaming). All of this started with writer-director Bryan Bertino, whose post-Strangers career has been similarly awkward, with projects scrapped (including a Sam Raimi-produced horror called The Man) and non-entities like Mockingbird and The Monster failing to register with even the most devoted of horror fans. He had a little bit more luck with 2020’s grim rural horror The Dark and the Wicked but it hasn’t been the ascent of a bold new voice in the genre that many had expected and his latest is a disappointing reminder of exactly what’s been lost since 2008.
Vicious was supposed to be something of a comeback, a major studio horror with a wide summer release and a concept that should easily make it franchise-ready. But after its August date was quietly cancelled, the film is now tumbling on to Paramount+ instead, likely to be lost in the Halloween streaming glut.
Like The Strangers, in another attempt to recapture a shred of that film’s success, it’s about an unwanted visitor and a late-night bang on the door. This time on the receiving end is Polly (Dakota Fanning), a woman trying to get her life together a little later than those around her, living alone in a family-owned home beyond her means, struggling to mature into her 30s. On the other side is a mysterious older woman (Kathryn Hunter) who lies her way inside before presenting Polly with a box, something you really don’t want to be presented with in a horror film. She explains that in order to survive the night, she has to give it something she loves, something she hates and something she needs.
It’s a set-up that raises a box-load of questions yet Bertino isn’t able to elegantly answer them, leaving us unmoored as the chaos begins. By the time the box opens, we’re also a little bored, a slow build that’s a little too slow, limply introducing Fanning’s stock fuck-up character, complete with tattooed arms, bottle of wine and ice-cream straight from the tub (never a good sign!). Bertino is a skilled conjurer of atmosphere and he makes the most of the darkness surrounding her (a suburban street over more remote isolation also makes for a refreshing change) but the gimmick at the centre of Vicious just isn’t sticky or scary enough to rival other, more proficient, adjacent horrors like Drag Me to Hell or The Ring or Smile or some of the better Saw movies. It’s so loosely constructed – the threat is coming from where, the penalty for failure is what, the powers of the box go how far – that it’s hard to know what’s happening and why we should care.
In place of suspense or dread, Bertino gives us gore, the only real element connecting the title to the film, and it’s certainly nasty enough to provoke a reaction, at least in the moment. But there’s only so much cutting and hacking and stabbing that can distract from unsure writing that isn’t taking us anywhere or really pushing us into pondering the uneasy moral questions at its centre. Even at 98 minutes, the film feels bloated, a last act of teasing, anticlimactic non-endings proving tiresome and ultimately incoherent, as if Bertino was doing panicked rewrites while he shoots (it’s very, very clear why this one was denied a theatrical release). Fanning is a more committed, if still not entirely convincing, final girl than she was in last summer’s silly fairy horror The Watchers but the novelty of watching Hunter do her all-in over-the-top genre bit has truly worn off, fatigue setting in halfway through last year’s genuinely atrocious bodily fluid-driven flop The Front Room. There’s a similarly exhausting excess to her performance here.
Bertino doesn’t need to give us another Strangers, and we certainly do not need anything else in that particular universe, but he needs to give us something more striking, and certainly stranger, than Vicious.
