‘The Box’ collapses on film

The premise behind Richard Kelly’s “The Box,” starring James Marsden and Cameron Diaz, is simple: You will reward yourself $9.50 if you do not go see the film. When it comes to contemporary film’s promise of a good puzzle feature – if the decade’s other torturous palette of options haven’t already done so – your viewing of “The Box” will likely cause something deep inside you to die.

Certainly it isn’t the actual plot of Richard Kelly’s newest motion picture that’s so disastrous. In fact, even amidst its often odious and impatient moments, “The Box” still offers viewers something that most films don’t: “what-does-it-all-mean” flickers of enjoyability, slippery metaphysical critiques (about a thousand overstated references to Sartre), and the nostalgic sensation of a Southern Richmond in the midst of a mid-70s crisis. What’s most striking about Kelly’s missteps is not that he chooses to submerge us in a barrage of twists and caveats, it’s that he forcefully drags us out of the miasma, expecting us to take him at his word much like Frank Langella’s sinister riddler.

The story begins sometime around Christmas 1976 in Richmond, Virginia with Marsden and Diaz struggling with the financial troubles common to most young married couple. Arthur, a prospective NASA astronaut at the other Langley, and Norma, a schoolteacher at Libbie Hill Academy (we can only guess), are soon visited by an older man with a deformed face (Langella) who offers them one million dollars if they push a red button on a wooden box. The catch is that somebody they don’t know will die, and that’s all, for now at least.

Naturally, the young couple pushes the button, catapulting a series of unfortunate and improbable events.

Kelly’s been at home in this landscape before. His 2001 cult film “Donnie Darko” appealed to a similar cosmic imaginary that “The Box” evokes; many of the locations and atmospheres of the newest film have the same haunted aesthetic as “Darko.” But what distinguished “Donnie Darko” as truly frightening was an uncanniness that escapes the majority of “The Box.” The problem stems from the characters, who don’t quite absorb into the scenery – not that they are really supposed to – and the idea that when the film “combusts,” (as all of Kelly’s films inevitably do at some point) we aren’t quite prepared for what’s ahead, for the suspension of disbelief that felt so naturally embroidered into the fabric of “Donnie Darko.”

As a healthy alternative, read the short story, “Button, Button,” by Richard Matheson, which the film and the revival “Twilight Zone” series episode are based on.

Grade: C