The Vicious Kind

I’m rating this within a very narrow group – i.e. an American independent film of the drama genre. The Vicious Kind is an extraordinary experience for me, if only because I've seen it twice in a very short space of time, which I don't do with any film (with the most glaring exceptions, of which there are exactly 3) – at most I’ll watch them at least two years apart. After the second viewing of this work, I feel that I became much closer to all the characters with their feelings and seemingly incomprehensible emotional processes, that I really experienced their fates with them and that I could understand the way they act and behave (though at first with difficulty from a rational perspective) at least a little bit. It's not often I get to pour my heart out like that in reviews), but I know that even years later, this film will still have appeal for me and I'll want to watch it again. Not because of how gorgeous Brittany Snow is in it (though maybe a little bit, too) or because Adam Scott's acting is near perfect in some moments. The main reason, for me, remains that The Vicious Kind tells a maximally human story about human failings, about situations where no one can handle being "master" of the situation and will completely succumb to his or her emotional nature, which at certain moments completely consumes them. A different film from other relationship dramas. Maybe not so much "devastating" and instructional as it is valuable in the substance of its message in relation to human emotions. (30.10.2011)