The Box Shows The Best And Worst Traits of Richard Kelly's Filmmaking

It's been a whole decade since Richard Kelly directed anything. Can you believe it? The director of Donnie Darko has been attached to a number of projects over the years, but he hasn't helmed anything new in a decade. Truth be told, I'd say it's only a matter of time before we see more from Kelly in the future considering his creative spirit and that he doesn't have any scandals tarnishing his reputation. Perhaps that's just the hopeful optimist in me talking though since I tend to find Kelly's trio of movies utterly fascinating. Yes, that even includes his weakest directorial effort, The Box, which offers plenty to dissect even if it doesn't either come together as a cohesive whole or deliver a Southland Tales-esque all-timer head trip of a mess. 

Set in 1976, Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) are a happily married couple living out their days in Langley, Virginia with their son Walter (Sam Oz Stone). They're currently in the middle of a dire financial situation that's left them needing a miracle to stay on solid ground. Enter the mysterious Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), who presents them with a small box containing a button. The choice is simple: if you press this button, someone they don't know will die and the Lewis family will receive $1 million. Norma chooses to push the button and the family promptly gets their cash money. But now both Arthur and Norma are investigating who Steward is and why he offered them this deal. Some answers are better left buried, as they'll soon find out.

The starting concept of The Box centered around choosing whether or not to kill someone for $1 million comes from a short story titled Button, Button by Richard Matheson and it seems like an idea that would fit right at home in The Twilight Zone. Fitting then that it got adapted into an episode of that iconic TV show! Anywho, Richard Kelly's script decides to use that concept as a launchpad for a far more bizarre storyline that soon involves water teleportation tubes, the concept of the after-life, aliens, NSA conspiracies and all kinds of other nuttiness. Did you really think the writer/director who abruptly plopped alternate dimensions into the third act of Southland Tales would really leave the plot of The Box at simply the titular device?

Richard Kelly is a mighty imaginative writer and though it frequently feels like the movie is going off on unrelated side tangents, there is some fun to be had in seeing where exactly Kelly takes his madcap premise next. Anyone who labels The Box predictable is a liar of the highest order, there's no way you could guess from the opening scene that the movie would eventually morph into a cross between a Pure Flix version of Da Vinci Code and The Lady in the Water. It's all so strange that you have to genuinely admire the creative ambition of writer/director Richard Kelly. He's not sleepwalking through his first studio movie assignment (his prior feature were independent works), he somehow got Warner Bros. and Media Rights Capital to spend $30 million on pure unfiltered Richard Kelly cinema and that's utterly delightful.

Lead actors Cameron Diaz and James Marsden sometimes seem in a daze trying to parse out the material they're working with, but they give the gonzo storyline their all, though the best of the committed actors has to be Frank Langella. I adore how the legendary actor is believable in his polite line deliveries to the Lewis family that seem to be channeling how Customer Service representatives are told to act towards belligerent customers. But Langella is still able to convey a presence bursting with a gravitas that makes it equally believable that his mysterious character could be a force to be reckoned with. Langella's weighty performance handily ties with Kelly's imaginative go-for-broke storytelling as the best part of The Box.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, The Box's script does suffer from a major foible that apparently plagued that directors cut of Donnie Darko, namely Kelly's tendency to overexplain things. There's some pretty chilling imagery in here, like an unknown man blankly staring at Diaz's character somehow under the orders of Langella's antagonist. How did they get there? Why are they doing that? The mind reels at the possibilities...and then The Box proceeds to deliver a number of third act sequences dedicated to pulling back the curtain and revealing who Arlington Steward is, including a clumsily executed scene where Steward just rambles on about his backstory and motivations to his assistant. Even Langella's performance can't make all this mumbo-jumbo dialogue interesting. 

Leaving things to the imagination can be such a great tool for generating suspense and some of the most unsettling moments of The Box plop the audience directly into the perspective of the Lewis family in not knowing what the hell is going on around them. Choosing to offer belabored explanations for so much of what's going on, that does nothing but suck all the mystique out of the families experiences. That storytelling choice, alongside some more visually unimaginative directorial work from Kelly and a number of clumsy pieces of dialogue, keep The Box at the bottom of Kelly's filmography, though it's still a frequently interesting thriller whose creative ambition is mighty admirable. Richard Kelly’s works rarely hit the fully-cohesive satirical (Southland Tales) or chilling (The Box) targets they aim to hit, but they do manage to be something interesting nonetheless, even if The Box ends up being more of just a curiosity rather than something more special like Southland Tales. 

That having been said, Hollywood, please give Richard Kelly to make more madcap bonkers stuff, even if it ends up being more average like The Box. If you can scrounge up cash for Michael Bay, Zack Snyder and Raja Gosnell to make new feature films, surely we can find resources to allow more of Richard Kelly’s kooky but endearing sci-fi tales to come to life.