Film review: The Box

Published on Thursday 3 December 2009 17:57

THE BOX (12A) *** DIRECTED BY: RICHARD KELLY STARRING: CAMERON DIAZ, JAMES MARSDEN, FRANK LANGELLA

AFTER his disastrous and wilfully confounding Southland Tales, Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly gets somewhat back on track with The Box, an intriguing sci-fi chiller-cum-morality play that builds up a genuine sense of mystery before writing a cheque Kelly's film-making abilities can't yet cash.

Until that point, though, there's much to enjoy in this high-concept tale of a suburban couple who take delivery of a box containing a button that, if pressed, will grant them a million tax-free dollars in cash. The downside? Pushing it will result in the death of someone they don't know.

That's also the premise of sci-fi writer Richard Matheson's source story, Button, Button, but Kelly personalises it by setting it in 1976, basing said couple on his own parents and giving it the look and grounded-in-domesticity feel of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. All of this nicely offsets the film's more sinister elements. These initially come in the form of Frank Langella, who turns up here minus half his face as the creepy Arlington Steward, the man who just happens to deliver the aforementioned box and indecent proposal and to Nasa engineer Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) and his teacher wife Norma (a nicely understated Cameron Diaz) on the very day that personal and financial woes seem to be conspiring against them.

Is this a coincidence? Fate? Kelly uses the film's probing what-would-you-do? scenario to draw us into an increasingly strange cosmic world, encouraging us to look for connections among the Sartre references, the nose-bleeding strangers and random-seeming messages that begin cropping up in Arthur and Norma's lives. Alas, the moment explanations have to be proffered and loose ends tied up, Kelly opts to indulge in the kind of over-blown, pseudo-religious, mystical nonsense he was forced to keep at bay in his original, near-perfect cut of Donnie Darko.

The effect is that, instead of being left with a heartfelt, brain-bending mystery just slippery enough for answers to remain tantalisingly out of reach, we're subjected to watery visions of an amniotic-like afterlife, hushed conversations about God and the presence of sombre cults that at best recall some of the wilder episodes of The X-Files and at worst edge the film into the barmy, born-again blockbuster territory of Knowing. Still, that first half suggests Kelly might not be the one-hit wonder Southland Tales suggested he was.