If Dakota Fanning hands you a box and says don’t open it unless you’re ready to lose your mind, run. Or don’t. That’s the hook behind Vicious, a slow-burn horror flick from Bryan Bertino, the writer-director behind The Strangers, and based on what just dropped at San Diego Comic-Con, this one’s coming for your nerves.. The official trailer shows a dark story that pulls viewers in from the first frame.
In Vicious, Dakota Fanning plays Polly, a seemingly regular woman visited by a mysterious stranger in the middle of the night. The visitor drops off a wooden box with a simple—but deeply unsettling—ritual: place three things inside it—something you need, something you hate, and something you love. That’s it. But if you don’t follow through? Bad things happen. The kind of bad that starts with subtle shifts in reality and ends with full-on psychological collapse.
There’s something quietly intense about Dakota Fanning when she’s put in horror territory. From Hide and Seek to The Alienist, she knows how to ride the line between victim and fighter. In Vicious, she looks like she’s doing both. The trailer doesn’t give us all her cards, but you can tell her performance is going to be internal, subtle, and devastating. The trailer plays this beautifully, teasing paranoia, disorientation, and some warped version of grief all dressed up in dim lighting and dread-heavy audio cues. Kathryn Hunter (you may remember her as the three witches from The Tragedy of Macbeth) plays the eerie visitor who sets the events in motion. From the moment she shows up, Fanning’s world begins to unravel.
Key Cast and Crew to Watch
In addition to Dakota Fanning, the film features Kathryn Hunter, Mary McCormack, and Rachel Blanchard. Director Bryan Bertino also wrote the script. Bryan has a rep for using horror to explore trauma (The Strangers, The Monster), and Vicious seems like a return to that form. This isn’t jump-scare horror. It’s the kind of creeping unease that comes from watching your reality collapse cell by cell. The trailer is careful not to show too much, but what it does reveal is thick with metaphor: rooms shift, memories fade, and time gets slippery.
Final Thoughts
With Vicious, it feels like Bertino is making the kind of horror that doesn’t just scare—it sticks. You finish the movie and find yourself checking your own emotional baggage just in case some creepy stranger tries to drop a box on your doorstep.
This one’s got potential. Fanning’s performance looks strong, the concept is tight, and if the writing keeps its metaphor sharp, Vicious could be one of this year’s horror standouts.
Stay tuned for the streaming release on Paramount+ and the digital launch later this year.