Film Review: “Vicious” (2025)

Starring Dakota Fanning opposite herself.

Have you seen The Box, starring James Marsden and Cameron Diaz? Vicious is The Box eliminating the mysterious Ed Harris figure and the money, retaining the basic plot angles, adding lots of prosthetic gore. The woman dropping off a box for no reason. The same non-answer ending. Toss in a zest of Dakota Fanning playing her mirror image, in an acting role that doesn’t challenge her.

I’m curious what the filming budget was for Vicious. Most of the film is set in the same house, with brief exiting for the exterior similar homes nearby. Fictional blood for imagery, I can take. This film goes hard on the blood to fill the middle’s running time.

All popular music is a copy of something, or a response. In the olden days, you wrote a song setting someone straight, or a rap song starting beef. I’m fine that Vicious directly borrows, to say it lightly, from The Box. I might call it, “Look, I’m doing it better, haha!” boldness. Famous directors do it all the time. Ryan Murphy’s Beauty on TV debuting last week is an “I can make The Substance bigger and better. Watch me.” Very sassy. The press is loving his in your face, larger than life FX on the body horror.

My issue with this movie is, why wasn’t it a bigger, better telling of a same old creepy box dropped off at someone’s house by a weird stranger? Why take everything good out of the movie that was and leave it flat on its face? Why not have more creativity? Can’t Miss Fanning leave her film set? Why isn’t anyone here interesting? Why not resolve the unanswered questions in the original The Box? I as a viewer spent time wondering where in Canada this movie was filmed, and no, not once was I absorbed in it.

Films without interactions from anyone else on screen can work. See Tom Hanks in Castaway. It’s how you pull it off, or don’t.