‘Vicious’ Review: Dakota Fanning Delivers in a Paramount+ Horror Flick That Can’t Quite Get on Her Level

What gives with horror films and boxes? The objects never reveal anything good, as anyone who’s seen Hellraiser, Wish Upon, The Box and countless others can tell you. And yet the literal plot device keeps showing up again and again, most recently in the latest effort from director Bryan Bertino starring Dakota Fanning as a young woman who gets to find out for herself that boxes are just … evil. Maybe a lot of horror filmmakers experienced really bad Christmases when they were kids.

Fanning, for whom this film is certainly a showcase, plays Polly, who’s revealed to be a physical and emotional mess in the opening scenes, in which she’s shown anxiously puttering around her large, unkempt house, chain-smoking and trying on dresses for an upcoming important interview. But she’s not so self-absorbed as to ignore an old woman, confused and probably suffering from dementia, who…