Pop Quiz

WITH HIS FIRST TWO FILMS, Richard Kelly carved out a pretty
unique niche in American cinema. I’ll suggest that his funny, creepy,
mind-bending Donnie Darko is pretty much a work of genius. His
follow-up, the much-loathed Southland Tales, is decidedly
not a work of genius—but, for what it’s worth, it
is what would happen if Philip K. Dick and the cast of
Saturday Night Live dropped acid together, and then Buffy and
The Rock and Justin Timberlake crashed their party. (The bewildering
result sure as hell wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but it was to mine.)
Writer/director Kelly doesn’t make films that’re easily classifiable,
or films that you can recommend to strangers without fear of violent
reprisal—but he does make films that’re unlike anything else out
there, and his latest, The Box, is no exception.

The Box is based on a 1970 short story by Richard Matheson,
“Button, Button,” which was also adapted into a Twilight Zone episode during that series’ so-so ’80s revival. The setup: Early one
morning in 1976, Arthur and Norma Lewis (James Marsden and a more or less entirely horrible Cameron Diaz) find a mysterious box on the stoop of their suburban home. The
box has a single button on its top, and soon enough Arlington Steward
(Frank Langella), a creeptastic dude with a burn-mangled face, presents
Norma with a “financial opportunity”: If she and her husband press the
box’s button, Steward says, two things will happen. First, someone they
don’t know will die; second, the Lewises will get a million
dollars.

Aside from Langella’s enunciation of the phrase “one million
dollars”—which, alas, is reminiscent of the fruity smirk of Dr.
Evil—much of the dialogue that results from the couple’s moral
quandary has the tone and stiffness of a Philosophy 101 discussion:
“What is it to really know someone?” Arthur dutifully ponders,
as Norma dreams of all the ways a million bucks could improve their
lives. (Despite the fact that Arthur is some kind of rocket scientist
at NASA and drives a gleaming Corvette, and despite the fact that Norma
teaches Sartre’s No Exit at a private school, we’re told that
the Lewises live paycheck to paycheck.)

So the Lewises wring their hands, and the stage is set for a
straightforward tale—by Kelly’s standards, at least. But those
expecting that Kelly, after the critical and commercial catastrophe of
Southland, will scale things back on the bizarro scale are gonna
be surprised. Shortly after its initial premise is introduced, The
Box spirals into an overwhelming clusterfuck of sci-fi surrealism
that’s as imaginative, fascinating, disorienting, and frustrating as
anything in Darko and Southland. Soon enough, NASA’s Mars
Landers get involved, and that Arthur C. Clarke quote about advanced
technology being indistinguishable from magic gets repeated a few
times, and weird water portals start opening up, and zombie people
start getting nosebleeds, and scientists start muttering phrases like
“the altruism coefficient,” and there’s some Eve-in-Eden-style blaming,
and plenty of alluding to No Exit, and a foot prosthesis becomes
almost as important of a prop as the box’s get-rich-quick button.

Much of the stuff in The Box is the sort of obtuse,
intentionally vague shit that usually makes me want to shove a
screwdriver into my ear—but, somehow, Kelly makes it work. As
bizarre as things get in The Box—and as bizarre as they
got in Darko and in Southland—I can’t ever shake
the feeling that there’s a method to Kelly’s madness, that he knows
exactly what he’s doing and he’s gonna keep on doing it, whether his
audiences like it or not. (It’s a profound understatement to note that
the crowd I saw The Box with did not, shall we say, care for
it.) The Box surges forward in uneven bursts; the dialogue is
often the blankly straightforward sort one would expect from, well,
No Exit or a Twilight Zone episode; and on the rare
occasions we’re given solid plot information, it’s clumsily delivered
in expository chunks; unlike the darkly comic Darko or the
preposterous Southland, there’s little humor here to flavor the
weirdness. Most of the time The Box is just
weird—creative and original and entertaining as hell, but,
at least on first viewing, equally inscrutable. While I can’t blindly
recommend it—I’m not a huge fan of violent reprisal—I will
say this: I’ll be seeing it a few more times, and I’m already looking forward to
whatever Kelly cooks up next.