The Box - Rating: 9

2009 Release directed by Richard Kelly

     Marketed through TV ads as a Twilight Zone type story with a fairly simple premise and starring that cute Cameron Diaz, this film left the multiplex crowd going -- huh?  Almost every critic I read also didn't get it, or thought it wasn't worth getting I guess.  They needed to know who they were dealing with:  Richard Kelly the new master of American film surrealism.  It's a sort of pop surrealism that doesn't take itself too seriously as in his two films before The Box;  Donnie Darko and Southland Tales.

     The Box takes place in 1976 and Kelly gives everything an overstated, garish 70's look.  As the film opened, I first thought boy, this actually IS bad.  But the stiffly delivered camp dialogue is purposeful, the clue I caught was that whenever someone passed a TV there was something really corny on the set (like the crying Indian from the 70's environment ads.  In what I thought was a gutsy move, late in the film after the cornyness of  the TV shots has been established, one of those images is of the Twin Towers).  So the whole thing is given a campy, corny vibe while at the same time requiring you to be familiar with the writings of Jean-Paul Sarte, especially his iconic existentialist play, No Exit, in order to get many of the film's references and to help you make as much sense of it as possible.

     The plot is based on a sci-fi short story involving a mysterious stranger offering people a chance to push the button on the box which will result in them getting
$1 million and causing the death of someone in the world.  The film seems to complete the short story about a half hour in when the mystery man delivers what I assume is the punch line of the story that makes you go -- whoa!  Then much weirdness ensues, leaving it up to us to concoct theories of who the mystery man is and what he's up to.

     Like Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, and any good surrealism, The Box is is a perplexing puzzle of a film -- a thoroughly enjoyable one.