The Box

Editorial

“Fate... up against your will” —   that haunting refrain from Echo & The Bunnymen’s Killing Moon set the mood for Richard Kelly’s cult debut Donnie Darko, and it’s proved to have an eerie resonance throughout the director’s work. From the schizoid parallel worlds of his time-travelling teen to the apocalyptic dread of his unfairly-maligned sophomore debacle Southland Tales, Kelly’s is a universe in which characters face grim choices welded to some inevitable doom.

While The Box is Kelly’s first feature adapted from a source not his own, it fits uncannily into this particular world. Based on the 1970 short story “Button, Button” by genre craftsman Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, The Twilight Zone), the premise is a simple, self-contained paradox. A financially-stricken young couple is visited by a mysterious stranger bearing a device and a tempting proposal. Push the button and receive — cue Dr. Evil pinky, if you must — one million dollars. The catch? Someone they don’t know is going home with a consolation prize — death. It’s fate versus will all over again. 

Matheson’s story — adapted once as a perfunctory episode of the new ’80s Twilight Zone — both provides the film’s framework and serves to spark Kelly’s own imaginings, which prove fascinating to watch unravel as the nature of the “experiment” on the couple comes into focus. To the gimmick idea the director adds a curious subplot focused on the Viking Lander missions to Mars, making James Marsden’s character a NASA camera developer and transforming Langella’s spook Arlington Steward into so much more than an oblique plot device. It’s not surprising that Kelly described The Box as his most personal film: his father worked on the Viking project, no doubt fuelling the boy’s sci-fi obsession that again flourishes here. At one point the couple’s son marvels at Arthur C. Clarke’s theory that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, while keen eyes will get a kick out of the way Kelly frames the red button to resemble a certain malevolent supercomputer.  

The Box also feels like the spiritual and emotional sequel — or prequel — to Donnie Darko. Kelly reprises the dread that made his debut so familiar and unsettling, while avoiding the hubristic (if inspired) meta-narrative mayhem that deterred so many from Southland Tales. (It’ll also restore the faith of those who feared his debut may have been a fluke.) If Darko found a dispossessed suburbia splintering under Reagan-era paranoia, then The Box taps into a kind of Me-Decade spirituality where a loopy New Age still seemed possible. Similarly, it channels the dramatic tow of ’70s sci-fi such as Spielberg’s Close Encounters and Philip Kaufman’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, films whose mystical premises were anchored by the personal journeys of their protagonists.

Far beyond the basic “what if?” thriller it’s being sold as, The Box shape-shifts in unexpected, sometimes outlandish, but always curious fashion; winding its way toward the outer limits while retaining the essence of Matheson’s plot — and the inescapable consequences for his characters (portrayed with surprising levels of conviction by Marsden and Diaz; and chilling mastery by Langella). Just as the fatalistic loop of the narrative recalls the filmmaker’s previous work, so the movie is filled with unmistakable, off-kilter Kelly moments — like the way a nosebleed becomes a pandemic of possession, or a demented teenager flashes a goofy smile to herald some future terror — and comes furnished with the kind of baroque score that Bernard Herrmann might have created. This being Kelly, it goes without saying that there’ll be a bubbling pool of plasma, a Lynchian moment (“I’m in your backyard”) and intimations of out-of-body travel… but we say enough.

If the final-act weirdness threatens to blur into crazy logic, The Box is never less than electric to watch; the puzzling incidents, if anything, celebrating the film’s Twilight Zone pedigree. After all, as Steward says to one of his conspirators: “I like mystery. Don’t you?” 

Luke Goodsell