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The young director Richard Kelly is as loved for his cult smash hit Donnie Darko as he is loathed for his indulgent sophomore effort Southland Tales. Based on “Button, Button,” a short story by the fantasy writer Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) as well as an episode of The Twilight Zone, The Box is a sincere and sinister morality tale that breezes right past slick, pre-packed sci-fi to find a resting place somewhere in the outlandish and exceedingly eccentric world of artists so true to themselves that their work inspires and infuriates in equal measure.
The year is 1976 (not a particularly good year for fashion, hairstyles or wallpaper although Kelly and his production designers replicate the period ugliness beautifully). Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz), a private school teacher and her husband, Arthur (James Marsden), a NASA engineer hoping to become an astronaut, live in an attractive Virginia suburb where the Corvette in the driveway indicates that they are living, at least to some degree, beyond their means. Fiscal uncertainties prove to be a moot point when Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), a man who has suffered some sort of tragic accident that shoveled away half his face, shows up on their doorstep carrying a curious wooden box with a large red button. Steward has a simple proposal. If Norma and Arthur push the button, two things will happen: first, they will be given one million dollars, and second, someone they’ve never met will drop dead.
What would you do?
How Norma and Arthur answer that question has tremendous moral and cinematic implications. It’s no spoiler to tell you that they—specifically Norma—push the button. But that is where the predictabilities end. From that point on, The Box becomes unhinged from reality, transforming into a cornucopia of bizarro plot points involving NASA’s search for extraterrestrial life on Mars, government cover-ups, healthy doses of Jean-Paul Sartre, and even a Sophie’s Choice or two. What Kelly does with this, even if it doesn’t all work (Darko didn’t come together completely either, but half the fun was trying to figure it out and failing), is a work of outlandish genius.
Kelly’s film may sound like a Hitchcockian thriller (the Bernard Herrmann-esque score comes compliments of the group Arcade Fire) but it is more interested in approximating early Steven Spielberg, when the now iconic director was first making a name for himself with such films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. and placing young, beautiful families in peril beyond human reckoning. For good measure, Kelly throws in other spooky 1970’s imagery, particularly the zombie herds found in the remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and even a bit of 2001’s consciousness-altering mind trips. Kelly does a superb job balancing relative mundane family emotions with galactic experiments involving greed, altruism and the ramifications for seemingly innocuous actions unfathomable but in a film this deliciously off kilter. Despite their initial decision, Kelly’s characters are never unsympathetic, even the dapper Frank Langella who reeks of impending doom.
Kelly has a gift for spooky visuals and creepy atmospherics, and proves indefatigably that one doesn’t need a monster to have a horror film. Unsettling and pervasively soaked in dread, The Box is like living inside the mazelike mind of a paranoid conspiracy theorist. There are sharp and sudden turns, meandering passageways, frustrating dead ends and ultimately light infused portals opening into a vast and writhing world in which Kelly is working out an apocalyptic world view, puzzling through basic human questions such as free will and one human being’s responsibility to another. (See if you can locate Kelly’s apparent allusions to Adam and Eve, and the original sin that was introduced into paradise at the hands of a woman). All of this leads to an ending that is both unknowable and simultaneously inevitable, a finale that grows more serious as the events leading up to it become more preposterous.
Allow The Box to push your buttons. What could possibly go wrong?
© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
