Climbing Higher Pictures

Based on the short story by Richard Matheson, The Box is Richard Kelly‘s third foray into cinema following the cult hit Donnie Darko and the underwhelming Southland Tales. If you were given a box with a button and told that pushing the button would kill someone you didn’t know and earn you one million dollars, would you do it? More importantly, what happens next? Can the third act of this thriller stay on the rails or does it go careening off into Lala land? Find out:

The Box Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: C

This is a crying shame. Richard Kelly, the USC graduate behind the cult classic Donnie Darko, really seemed poised to break into the mainstream. His follow up, Southland Tales, was met with scathing reviews and several prolonged re-edits that did little to help make the final project cohesive. Many found the script overly complicated, pushing past even Kelly’s own previous complexity and into a realm of sensory overload. With The Box, many expected him to tone back his heady plot intricacies and focus on what made Darko such a resounding success, a well-developed narrative. Taking his lead from a short story by Richard Matheson also seemed like a positive move. Basing something off a Twilight Zone veteran and the author of I Am Legend looks, on paper, as though it could successfully ground the writing and make for a marketable and accessible film going experience. In some ways it succeeds in this regard, but it more than makes up for such victories with colossal breaks in tone and character which we neither fully understand nor honestly believe.

Let us think, for a moment, about whether the premise of the film is enough to hold you through a feature length runtime. Family receives a box. Box has big red button. If you push the big red button within 24 hours, someone you don’t know will die, and you will receive a payment of one million dollars. So already you’ve set up two blocks of time which you have to work really hard to make suspenseful. The beginning of the film, without the box involved at all, which the audience will know is all character development and otherwise meaningless exposition, and the period before the button is pressed, as you know it has to be, in which various characters find out things about their life that would cause them to be more likely to push the damn button.

Surprisingly, it is in this first act that the movie is easily at its strongest. The characters are likable, even when Cameron Diaz is attempting her horribly fake accent, and considering that the couple are based off of Richard Kelly’s own parents, the dialogue is understandably layered and interesting. His father really did work as part of the Viking program crafting lenses, his mother really did have a tragic accident occur involving an X-ray of her foot, and Kelly really did grow up in a similar house in the year 1976 when the film was based. Knowing all that really only gives you a sense of why the beginning of the film is so strong and engrossing, and once the device is introduced, why the believability factor could begin to spiral out of control.

After the button is pressed, the gears start moving at a frantic pace, and with Frank Langella popping up periodically in one of his more wonderful performances, you will find yourself, whether you like it or not, strapped in for the ride. Who is behind the box? Why is the NSA involved? What does this have to do with NASA? What really happened when they pushed the button? How can our characters maneuver their way out of the maze they’ve let themselves fall into? Who will live? Who will die? What does it all mean?

As was intended, I’d assume, the answer to that last question is left fairly ambiguous. Sure you’ll start realizing things you missed once the credits roll with only a few minutes of concerted thought, and yes there will be many places that the movie may still confuse you after several days. The one thing the film does not do, however, is end itself in a satisfying manner. I will not say whether or not the ending in necessarily “happy”, nor if there would be a better way one could end it without sacrificing the overall message. It’s not that the ending is too confusing, too drawn out, or particularly forced either. In fact, the emotional resonance of the final scenes is on par with those in the opening of the film, leaving us to contemplate the purpose of much of the middle. Enough unfulfilled ideas abound in the story that you’re left with a feeling of immense disappointment and loss, the kind of sickly taste of betrayal following a carefully planned and executed manipulation of the senses. There are so many moments, looking back on the film, where there could have been a sense of accomplishment, a sense of figuring out what was going on in time to actually act upon that knowledge. Instead we realize each mistake as the event is in progress and are left much like the characters, as rats in the maze. The editing and the music don’t give us much more to grab onto either as each is heavily stylized in their own way, and the music, in particular, tends to wrench you out of the experience at the most inopportune times.

I feel really bad having to talk about the way in which the film rings hollow to me. It’s like in an effort to be mainstream Kelly thought he could broadcast the premise of his movie while holding the important cards deliberately close to the chest. We never know more than the characters do, but that doesn’t really matter, as they only figure things out after such facts would have proven useful, and the whole exercise makes one wish that their actions aren’t all in vain. In Kelly’s world, you can’t escape your choices, even if they come at the very beginning of a film, and this fact, more than anything else, is what keeps the end product from rising above its faults. I had such high hopes…