The Box (2009)Richard Kelly is offering you a mysterious new film. It begins with a promising concept, and is from the director of cult hit Donnie Darko. But there's a catch: if you watch it, something inside you will die.
The Box proves that it is possible to make a boring film about million dollar long range mystery assassination incorporating a queasily disfigured mystery man, lightning from Mars (or something), creepy automatons, a library with a gate to eternal damnation and nasal haemorrhaging on a frequency suggesting the entire shoot was conducted in Tibet.
The problem is not that The Box is full to the brim of such potentially tasty prime hokum - this you'd expect from a tale based on a 'Twilight Zone' episode based on a sci-fi story first published in 'Playboy', and it could have made for fabulous B-movie silliness. The film's problems come where po-faced Kelly thinks outside the box, wrapping what ought to be his shiningly daft core concept in all manner of numerology nonsense and half-baked moralising, tied up with a pretty bow by Jean-Paul Sartre, whose writings are dragged in to give this dud package spurious philosophical dazzle. Hell is other people? Perhaps, if they're fans of The Box.
To give Kelly his due, to begin with, The Box seems like it could be good fun. As the box's delivery man Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) says, "I like mystery. Don't you?" We do. But the best thing about a mystery is seeing it resolve in a satisfying Sherlock Holmes-ean click of enlightenment. Alternatively, a simple 'there is no answer' might prove equally haunting, but what won't do is watching our poor little mystery wander off and get lost in a forest of loose ends, half answers and metaphysical conspiracies.
The dilemma posed by Arlington Steward (ignore the way his name calls to mind a smooth moustachioed detective who fancies himself a ladies' man) is intriguing, but not for the length of a feature film. Everyone in the cinema will be asking themselves what they would do given a similar situation, before, it is to be hoped, conceding that no, it's not okay to murder a stranger for lots of money. Even if you really, really, really would like the money very much, the whole thing stinks so badly, you'd surely avoid getting entangled with this creepy chap's offer if only out of a sense of self-preservation.
Having wilfully ignored two good reasons not to get involved, it's difficult to go on a journey with Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden), especially as they already appear to be grinding lasciviously in the lap of luxury, with a sports car, expensive clothes and a massive 'Cluedo'-style house full of nice things. Production designer Alexander Hammond says, "What this house tells you is that these people don't have a lot of money. It's nice but not huge." The camera reputedly adds ten pounds to actors, so something on a similar architectural scale must be at work with this in no sense modest house.
Norma and Arthur's decision to kill another human being is clearly based on a desire to continue living beyond their means. Yes, some of the money is intended for an operation on Norma's disfigured foot (apparently Kelly's mum had a similar problem in real life), and yes, Arthur's just been passed over for promotion at NASA (Kelly's dad was a NASA engineer) but they basically want a fancy lifestyle, including private school for their only child. It's not a very sympathetic set-up. To resolve this difficulty, as the majority of film noir classics or certain Hitchcocks manage perfectly well, you need characters that are so charismatic or otherwise interesting that we care what happens to them whatever ridiculous decisions they've made. Sadly, these boringly blank slices of retro mid-western whitebread are as compelling as a dog-eared copy of Housewife's Journal.
Kelly appears to hope his sense of period visuals will stand in for colour and character. He's as unsubtle as ever - the snow globe 1970s Christmas period over which everything plays out is signposted with clips from sitcoms of the era, while the clothes could have slipped straight off a model from one of those kitsch cards where a young woman in slacks and twinset is oh-so winsomely captioned "Lola didn't know she was a lesbian" or similar. And repeatedly dragging master of science fiction Arthur C Clarke's most famous quotation - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - into something this unworthy is just plain rude.
By the time the inevitable Terrible Consequences churn slowly into life and play out in their full agonisingly clever-clever glory, you'll be praying that somebody somewhere out there who you don't know is pushing a button that will put you, lucky stranger, out of your misery.
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