In the course of a snow-swept road, which at evening appears wholly deserted to the coolness of twilight, sits a solitary field. This picket black dice, and the much more abject darkish secrets and techniques contained therein, is the tantalizing hook of Bryan Bertino’s Vicious. It’s on this object, we’re warned, awaits a thriller that may seal Dakota Fanning’s destiny. And as a wierd caller on the door intones, if she doesn’t settle for this reality, then she’s going to die that very night.
In an age of high-concept style metaphors grappling with the load of mortality, psychological sickness, or the which means of God and the Satan, the field and the movie which it anchors place themselves as a meaty parable desirous to say one thing of import. And but, after 98 minutes of their firm at this yr’s Improbable Fest, the most important thriller is perhaps how hole and threadbare the inside life is on such a good-looking movie.
Bertino definitely has his skills on show within the movie. In a earlier decade, he even masterminded the cult customary for residence invasion thrillers when he wrote and directed The Strangers—a movie they hold trying to redo however by no means match, together with through Renny Harlin’s actually dire The Strangers – Chapter 2 (which additionally assaulted Austinites at Improbable Fest this previous weekend). Vicious, in contrast, truly has some notes of advantage.
The environment is bleakly oppressive in its wintry hews and hushed performances, chief amongst them being the elder Fanning sister, who’s overdue for a plumb grownup function in style or in any other case. She is compellingly terrified right here, too, as a thirtysomething ne’er-do-well who by no means actually discovered a spot on this life past the previous decaying residence of a grandparent. She was trapped there lengthy earlier than a terrific, if all too briefly used, Kathryn Hunter exhibits up because the caller within the evening. Why Hunter picked this lady’s home and feels the necessity to bequeath Fanning the thriller field shouldn’t be instantly clear, nevertheless it attracts the viewer in as a lot as Bertino’s terse sound design. The filmmakers use the solitude of an empty home to bear down on the viewer, which in flip makes the sudden audible presence of a seeming spirit from the field all of the extra stark.
