The Box (*)

Directed by: Richard Kelly

Starring: Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella

Seen: March 16^th 2010

* Out of ****

The events portrayed in The Box occur in 1976, when NASA planned to send rovers to Mars. The movie opens with an NSA (National Security Agency, not a NASA typo) memo, stating that Arlington Steward has recovered from severe burn wounds and is now delivering units related to the Mars Project. The unit in question is a wooden box with a red button. The boxes are being delivered to normal people with an auspicious line attached; if you push the button, you will receive $1,000,000; but someone who you do not know will die.

Norma (Diaz) and Arthur (Marsden) Lewis are the movie’s first two recipients of the box, delivered by Arlington Steward (Langella), his face hideously deformed from the severe burn wounds mentioned in the opening memo. They receive the box around the same time Arthur hears he was rejected from NASA’s astronaut program, and Norma and Arthur realise they are going to have difficulty paying the bills. After some discussion, Norma pushes the button, and the viewer is shown a 911 call where a woman was shot at home, her little girl locked in the bathroom upstairs. Not soon after that Steward are at Norma and Arthur’s door, delivering the case full of money.

Arthur does not want to let things go, and starts investigating Steward, going down the inevitable rabbit-hole. He starts seeing strange things and the movie takes a much stronger science fiction road from here. Steward’s wife, Dana, meets him in a library while he searches for clues but is accosted by a group of men looking as if they are being controlled by some other force. Dana brings him to a choice, three doorways with two leading to eternal damnation (so does not choosing a door), and Arthur chooses door number 2 (not a spoiler, they are indistinguishable, and even then the viewer never really figures out which outcome Arthur “chose”).

The era is well represented in The Box, as you are right back in the 70’s with even the softer hues the movie is filmed in looking like degraded film from that time. The movie is however an uncertain mess with some interesting ideas that never take off, or are never sufficiently explained, and it seems to me that director Richard Kelly was attempting to infuse too much of his own signature into the Richard Matheson’s (he wrote the brilliant I Am Legend, the loose blueprint for Wil Smith’s 2007 movie) original story. Richard Kelly made the mind-blowingly brilliant Donnie Darko in 2001, and some elements of Donnie Darko are vaguely visible here, but whatever worked in Donnie Darko does not work in The Box. The viewer is completely justified in feeling constantly uncomfortable, not with the story’s tone being unsettling, but with the uneven telling of it, the conscious effort going into confusing a viewer at all costs instead of just telling a story in a surprising and interesting way.

Following on the moral choice of money for murder, the movie escalates the choice, but not in a defendable way. Yes, if you choose money for someone else’s life you should not simply get to enjoy it, but the new choices should not be the enforced and entirely immoral ones presented in The Box. There should be room for redemption, or absolution at the very least. Here the choice simply became more bizarre and more disturbing, and ultimately takes the viewer to a point where he wishes he had walked out of the cinema much earlier. The Box will be on my derision list from today.