Dakota Fanning<\/a> 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\u2014but deeply unsettling\u2014ritual: place three things inside it\u2014something you need, something you hate, and something you love. That\u2019s it. But if you don\u2019t follow through? Bad things happen. The kind of bad that starts with subtle shifts in reality and ends with full-on psychological collapse.<\/p>\nThere\u2019s something quietly intense about Dakota Fanning when she\u2019s 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\u2019s doing both. The trailer doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s world begins to unravel.<\/p>\n
Key Cast and Crew to Watch<\/p>\n
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\u2019t jump-scare horror. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Final Thoughts<\/p>\n
With Vicious, it feels like Bertino is making the kind of horror that doesn\u2019t just scare\u2014it 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.<\/p>\n
This one\u2019s got potential. Fanning\u2019s performance looks strong, the concept is tight, and if the writing keeps its metaphor sharp, Vicious could be one of this year\u2019s horror standouts.<\/p>\n
Stay tuned for the streaming release on Paramount+ and the digital launch later this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Dakota Fanning hands you a box and says don\u2019t open it unless you\u2019re ready to lose your…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[28765,28766,156,409,111,139,69,28767],"class_list":{"0":"post-30478","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-bryan-bertino","9":"tag-dakota-fanning","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-vicious"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}