The Box (2009)

The Box begins on a crisp, pre-dawn autumn morning in 1976, as an attractive couple awakens to the ringing doorbell of their sleepy suburban Virginia home. The wife, Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz), limps down the stairs to find a car driving away, its occupant having left behind a gift box wrapped in brown paper. Over breakfast with her husband, Arthur (James Marsden), and son, Walter (Sam Oz Stone), she opens it to find another box inside. This one, made of wood and glass, houses a large red button.

Later that day, a well-dressed, soft-spoken man with half a face (Frank Langella) arrives to tell her that his name is Arlington Steward. He’s been instructed by his as-yet-unnamed employers to deliver the box to the couple with an offer. Push the red button inside and get a million dollars. There’s just one problem: if they do, someone they don’t know will die.

It’s a tough decision. Despite the fact that they live in a spacious house and drive a fancy sportscar, the family needs the money. Norma is a Jean Paul Sartre-loving English teacher at the upscale private school her son attends, but she’s just been informed that she will no longer receive a faculty discount for her son’s tuition. Meanwhile, Arthur, a NASA scientist working on the Mars Viking exploration, has just had his application to become an astronaut denied. To top things off, Norma needs surgery for her foot, on which she’s lost all but her pinky toe in a freak accident.

So, after much debate about whether or not the whole thing is some practical joke, Norma decides to push the button. From there on, the story devolves from an interesting morality play into a half-baked sci-fi junker. Suddenly, there are mind-controlled Body Snatchers-like messengers, government conspiracies and cover-ups, water portals into the beyond, and alien-abducted rocket scientists. Steward starts acting like Jigsaw, maneuvering the Lewises into an ultimate, impossible set of choices.

Augmented from Richard Matheson’s short story, “Button, Button,” The Box jumbles together too many story elements and film genres to make much sense. It’s clear from his past body of work that writer-director Richard Kelly likes to push buttons and ask tough questions of his audience. With his work in the unnerving and totally satisfying Donnie Darko, he masterfully blends science fiction and surrealism to pose real questions about the fears that drive us, and the personal sacrifices that define us.

In The Box, the only question you keep coming back to is what the hell is going on. For starters, why is this story set in the 1970s? It seems like nothing more than an excuse for Kelly to name-drop cancelled television shows from What’s Happening to Alice, and for Cameron Diaz to sport the feathered hairdo that suits her so well. How and why does Arthur mysteriously end up in a NASA hangar, commandeered by the NSA, which has ostensibly been commandeered by aliens? Most importantly, where do these mysterious employers (and Kelly, for that matter) get off preaching at and punishing us for our inability to do the right thing?

For their part, the actors look just as confused as their audience feels. Diaz frowns and pouts a lot, while Marsden is at turns both wild-eyed and dopey. Langella alone is immune to this bewilderment. His portrayal of Steward is so serene that it would be soothing if it weren’t so simultaneously creepy.

The Box also lacks the directorial flair that Kelly exhibited in Donnie Darko. Yes, there are big, swelling musical cues warning us that we should be very afraid. But when the action doesn’t follow through, it feels like an even bigger letdown. Likewise, the slow zoom in to a close-up happens often enough that we stop being fooled by it. And even though both Norma’s deformed foot and Steward’s teeth-revealing left cheek are visually arresting images (nothing like a giant, deranged bunny, of course), they’re not enough to make up for the rest of this mess.

Early in the film, Norma explains to her high school class the heart of Sartre’s most famous existential play, No Exit: hell is other people. After two hours of The Box, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that hell is writer-directors who bite off more than they can chew.

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