'The Box'Review: 3.5/5
Writer/director Richard Kelly's films seem to exist in isolated expanses of time and space. They are a caustic expose' on characters with odd jobs and an all encompassing adoration for cosmology and quantum gravity. 'The Box' is no different, focusing attention on a school teacher, Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz), her husband, Arthur (James Marsden), and an ominous man with a terrifyingly unusual scar, Arlington Steward (Frank Langella). He shows up at the doorstep to the couples' unadorned suburban home, and offers them a box with a foreboding red button inside. If they are to push it, they receive a million dollars. The catch? Someone will die. "Is this something we can live with?" Arthur asks his wife tentatively. Such is the premiere question that dictates the film's tightly-woven narrative arc.
So as not to give away spoilers I will not elaborate on the plot further, though it is by no means preposterous, as a majority of critics assert. Rather, the film is an inspired, high-concept parable that infuses a stark reality with supernatural accoutrement that only adds to the enthralling nature of the film's quasi-science fiction nucleus. Observing elements of suspense and harsh social commentary, the overall drab, muted atmosphere is at both times heightened and subdued - a vicious hybrid of realism confronted with the unexplainable. Why is the menacing, yet oddly polite, Steward so casual in his presentation of such a morbid catch-22? Maybe it's because he's wise enough to know that, especially in a time of recession, materialism is an unfortunate primordial value.
Shot in bleak whites, greys, blacks, reds, and browns and lensed with a keen adherence to the sense of dread and unease, which manifests in obscenely long-shots interspersed with rapid editing, Kelly formally suggests that the monotony of suburban life exists on the relative edge of unforeseen disorder, very much like chaos theory itself.
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