Bryan Bertino is horror’s most unsung auteur—a director whose command of tone, pacing, and unnerving, suggestive visual storytelling is matched by few.

With The Strangers, The Monster, and The Dark and the Wicked, the 47-year-old writer/director has proven himself a skillful genre craftsman, and he revisits many of his favorite tropes and tactics with Vicious.

A claustrophobic thriller about a young woman grappling with a daunting supernatural predicament that’s landed, quite literally, on her doorstep, Bertino’s latest is a sly, sinister film about self-loathing, sacrifice, and the things people will do to survive—with a great tormented performance from Dakota Fanning at its center.

Even if it doesn’t come together at the end, it deserves more than a streaming-only release—although

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