In the middle of a snow-swept street, which at night seems wholly abandoned to the chill of twilight, sits a solitary box. This wooden black cube, and the even more abject dark secrets contained therein, is the tantalizing hook of Bryan Bertino’s Vicious . It is in this object, we are warned, awaits a mystery that will seal Dakota Fanning ’s fate. And as a strange caller at the door intones, if she does not accept this truth, then she will die that very evening.

In an age of high-concept genre metaphors grappling with the weight of mortality, mental illness, or the meaning of God and the Devil, the box and the film which it anchors position themselves as a meaty parable eager to say something of import. And yet, after 98 minutes in their company at this year’s Fantastic Fest , the

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