[7]

The Box is weird, anachronistic, and indulgent, but I’d be lying to say I didn’t dig it. This is the third film from writer/director Richard Kelly, who created a cult phenomenon with Donnie Darko, but then flopped big time with the scatter-brained Southland Tales. The Box is intrinsically retro, based on an episode of the original Twilight Zone TV series (“Button, Button”, written by Richard Matheson) and bluntly patterned after Hitchcock, complete with a Hermannesque score. Cameron Diaz and James Marsden star as a couple who receive a mysterious box from a mysterious man (Frank Langella). If they open the box and push a button, they will receive one million dollars — but someone they do not know will die.

Without the proper frame of reference, Kelly’s high melodrama and tongue-in-cheek humor may be alienating. When he milks the movie’s simple premise for dramatic effect, The Box works very well. But Kelly still has a tendency to needlessly overcomplicate his storytelling, especially in the second act, where we get reintroduced to the watery portals of Donnie Darko. And for all the mystery that builds for the first hour, there’s a clunky scene where Frank Langella deflates the suspense and spells everything out for us. Fortunately, the third act introduces an entirely new moral dilemma, and comes to an appropriate, satisfying conclusion. Despite my problems with the movie, I enjoyed The Box as an old-fashioned homage to styles of filmmaking and storytelling decades away and sometimes forgotten.