The 2025 horror movie Vicious puts its protagonist through the wringer. Haunted and threatened by a mysterious force that forces her to do terrible things to survive, Polly (Dakota Fanning) spends the film suffering, screaming, and bleeding as the demands on her escalate.
The end of Vicious seems to close out one story and begin another, but there’s more to it than that. When I met writer-director Bryan Bertino (who also wrote and directed the original 2008 horror franchise-starter The Strangers) at the 2025 Fantastic Fest, he was happy to explain his intentions, and what happens next for the characters.
[Ed. note: End spoilers below for Vicious.]
Bertino focuses most of Vicious’ run time on Polly being tortured by something malevolent and powerful. Its nature is never really clear, but it centers on a box delivered to Polly by a stranger (Kathryn Hunter, recently Syril Karn’s judgmental mother on Andor). Once the box is in Polly’s hands, the thing haunting her repeatedly contacts her via her phone, demanding that she destroy herself and her life bit by bit, then hand over the box to another stranger.
Tara (Devyn Nekoda) is the unlucky young woman who answers her door when Polly is desperately trying to find someone she can force the box on. By the end of the movie, Polly has learned from Hunter’s character that giving the box to Tara didn’t sever its connection to her, and it will never stop demanding sacrifices. She’s also learned she can ignore its phone calls, if she refuses to be afraid of it. Is that a happy ending for her?
“I certainly think that at the end of the day, this movie has a lightness that some of my movies haven’t,” Bertino told Polygon. “But to me, the message is that you’re never really going to escape things, so you just have to keep going.”
In a Q&A after Fantastic Fest’s premiere screening, Bertino said Vicious in part is meant to reflect his own experiences with anxiety. “Probably a couple of years before I started writing the script, I started having panic attacks, and was dealing with anxiety in a way that I haven’t dealt with before,” he said. “That opened my eyes to all your different senses that are going off when you’re having these moments. […] I wanted to bombard an audience and bombard a character, to try on some level to capture maybe some of the things that I had felt.”
While Polly comes out of the movie with a little more self-control, the clear sense that her trials aren’t over was meant to reflect how anxiety works in real life.
“When I look at this movie and think about her standing on the road at the end, hearing the [phone] ringing and knowing it’s just going to keep going, and she’ll have to keep choosing — very rarely do we actually slay the dragons that we’re dealing with,” Bertino said. “Or at least that I’m dealing with. I’m just kind of constantly fighting.”
At one point, Polly attempts to get the box back from Tara, taking responsibility for bringing this predatory evil into someone else’s life, and potentially accepting death in order to contain the entity. But Tara pretends she doesn’t know what Polly is talking about, and politely sends her away. Inside her house, it’s revealed that Tara has murdered her parents on the box’s instructions, and bloody words painted on the wall remind her not to trust anyone.
“In the very end of the movie, Tara is locked in her own thing,” Bertino said. “That had so much to do with the way that — I’m sure all of us have tried to explain to someone we care about, ‘Oh, don’t do that, because I’ve been there before.’ And people have to go through their own battles.”
Bertino told Polygon that the final shots of Polly also reflect “one of the horror movies that matters the most to me”: Tobe Hooper’s influential 1974 slasher Texas Chain Saw Massacre. In that movie, a group of teenagers stumble across a family of murderers and are killed one by one. The bloodied, battered final survivor, Sally (Marilyn Burns) just barely escapes in the back of a pickup truck after witnessing a series of intense horrors, and seems to have lost her mind while keeping her life.
“I always think about her in the back of the truck, screaming,” Bertino said. “She has survived and she has won, in that sense. But survival at what cost? And I feel like with Polly — yeah, she’s standing in the road, on some level. She’s changed forever, just as we all are by our different traumas. We’re different from that point forward. And so some would say you’ve won that battle, but life is just going to keep going.”
Vicious is now streaming on Paramount Plus and available for purchase on digital platforms.