My, how the mighty have fallen—the mighty Richard Kelly, to be
exact. Mr. Donnie Darko has written and directed a tremendously bad
film—The Box—based on a Twilight Zone episode (1980s
vintage) based on a short story by Richard Matheson (1970s vintage). A
middle-class couple in ’70s Virginia receives a mysterious present, a
box with a button protected by a glass dome. A man with a big hole
burned into his face explains the deal: Press the button and you get a
million dollars, but somebody you don’t know will die.

Easy, right? The couple is middle-class with a NASA husband (James
Marsden), a Beckett-teaching wife (Cameron Diaz), and an annoyingly
smart-ass son (Sam Oz Stone). They’re running out of money to send
their kid to private school, but it’s not like they’re starving or
anything. And since rule number one in life is Don’t Make Deals with
Devils, they shouldn’t push the button.

Of course they push the button, almost casually. Why? It’s hard to
say. But it’s hard to say why anyone does anything in this movie. Why
does the wife respond to a personal query by a creepy
student—”why do you limp?”—by pulling off her sock and
revealing her hideously burned foot and then claiming the student
humiliated her? She humiliated herself! Why does hole-in-face man
(Frank Langella) have a magically fast healing rate that can’t seem to
heal the hole in his face? Why does he send NASA man through a portal
into the afterlife and then suck him back to normal life? (This has no
bearing on the rest of the film.) Why are his alien “employers”
“testing” the human race with this box trick? Why is he teleporting
human beings out of Virginia via a pool of viscous silver liquid? Why
is a pack of zombielike mouth-breathers pursuing NASA man around a
library? Why, why, why?

The whys could go on for a hundred years, but the answer is obvious:
The Box only has enough material to sustain a 30-minute Twilight Zone episode. Couple gets box, couple pushes button to receive a million
dollars and steal the life of someone they don’t know. Hole-in-face man
shows up, takes box, says he’ll give it to someone else—someone
they don’t know. The movie should have ended there, but Richard Kelly
had another hour and change to kill so he cooked up a string of
quasi-creepy improbabilities that lack the internal logic required to
achieve true creepiness.

Kelly could’ve run the other direction for a Lynchian randomness
that seems creepy because it has no internal logic, but The Box hangs
in a netherworld between successfully creepy logic and successfully
creepy illogic that is just confusing, frustrating, and, at times,
unintentionally funny.

What was good about The Box: the wallpaper in the couple’s home. Its
orange pop-art geometry really popped, like something from a Terry
Gilliam movie. And the hole-in-face makeup wasn’t bad—watching
the man’s rear teeth through the lesion in his face is nauseating and
mesmerizing. Everything else about The Box was a waste of time and
money. recommended

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

15 replies on “<i>The Box</i>: Um…We Really Liked the Wallpaper!”

  3. If you had seen the movie you would relize that there are no spoiler moments and as far as telling someone about the movie the only thing to be told is that it sucks, done rather nicely by Kiley. Two hours and $ stolen.

  4. Matheson’s original is better and a completely different type of story. I don’t know why they even bothered to credit him, because it’s pretty freakin’ misleading. Aliens?!

  5. pictured in the screenshot, the headphones worn by james marsden, the Sony CR-TSD 100s, were not released in America until March, 1982!!

  11. Ah, I figured out the plot twist from the stupid commercials: after you kill off someone you don’t know and collect the loot, OF COURSE, the box then goes to someone who doesn’t know you, so you or yours die.

    What else?

    The rest of that junk padding sounds both boring and annoying before you get to the point anyone with a brain would have sussed from the stupid commercial.

    Who needs spoilers?

  12. If this review “spoiled” you, then you’re retarded. Anyone with a half-way functioning brain had this movie figured out from the very first trailer.

  14. When I first read (very hastily) the first paragraph, never having heard anything about this movie before, I thought there was a button as in a coat button and not a button that you press. Which, when you think about it in the coat-button sense, makes this movie sound even more absurd.

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