The Box (2009, Richard Kelly) (Patreon)

44/100

Massive spoilers.

This movie's stupid.

And it's stupid in that ludicrously grandiose R. Kelly way. Richard Matheson originally wrote a simple "Monkey's Paw" riff with a particularly haunting twist: The woman* pushes the button because the reward is great and the punishment, she's been told, will befall someone unknown to her...but the person she doesn't (truly, deep down) know turns out to be her own husband. (Kelly pays homage via a quick exchange in which the couple considers that very possibility.) The Twilight Zone 2.0's adaptation, disowned by Matheson, let both parties survive but strongly implied that one of them will die when the button next gets pushed—still simple enough to constitute only half of the hour-long episode, and Kelly arrives there at more or less the same point, 37 minutes into the movie. Wisely, neither the short story nor the Twilight Zone segment makes any attempt to explain its bizarre premise. Who Steward works for, how he can know that a button not hooked up to anything has been pushed, why anyone would make such an offer in the first place—none of these questions is of any importance whatsoever. This is a simple morality tale. Simple!

Kelly does not do simple. Everything's gotta have a whole fucking mythology. And so he bloats "Button, Button" into some sort of alien-invasion tribunal, tied to the Viking missions for no very good reason. Not only is humanity itself being tested via the button unit, but there's a Human Resource Exploitation Manual, complete with diagrams detailing such components as the Water Coffin Triptych. (Plate 40 Test subject is submerged in NaOH+Hcl barrier during analysis period of 60 minutes. Gateway transit analysis will determine fate of test subjects.) I gather that Kelly's fans find this stuff funny rather than dumb, but it's so haphazardly integrated that the intended tone doesn't much matter. If your narrative hinges on a binary moral choice—should we act selfishly at a stranger's expense?—why the almighty fuck would you then introduce what's basically a random decision involving three options? And why have alien confederates tip Arthur as to which option is the correct one? How does that serve any test of Homo sapiens' worthiness? ("Okay, if we repeatedly hold up two fingers, 84% of them will choose liquid door #2. And since the galactic economy is based upon an Earth game show entitled I believe Let Us Make a Deal, Shall We?...") What finally sorta set me off was Norma telling Steward that she felt love for him, rather than pity, upon first seeing his facial deformity—a touching moment that seems as if it should be crucial to the test's outcome but in fact merely foreshadows her decision to (in essence) commit suicide for her son's sake. Nobody can stuff more symbolically freighted and visually arresting but fundamentally meaningless crap into a movie than Richard Kelly. He is the king of faux significance.

That's Ed, I must grudgingly concede that he can generate spine-tingling creepiness...so long as he leaves things unexplained (which he doesn't). Langella gives by far the film's strongest performance—Diaz and Marsden get relatively little to work with—and the missing half of his face, which Kelly frequently shoots from an angle that emphasizes the absence more than the scarring, is deeply unsettling in a way that's only undermined by our eventually learning how it happened. Leaving that a mystery would have been so much more effective. Similarly, I would have preferred not to know why Steward's minions are all standing in formation at one point, gazing into an unoccupied hotel pool that's surrounded by a fence covered in what looks like aluminum foil. (Actually took a note: "Spooky pool image, please no followup." Alas.) It still bugs me that Myrick and Sanchez felt compelled to add a quick interview soundbite explaining why The Blair Witch Project ends with Mike just standing motionless in a corner (far more chilling in the Sundance cut, which leaves it inexplicable), and The Box multiplies that frustration tenfold. Either leave it to our collective imagination or construct something that's internally consistent. Or just tell a simpler story. Not everything needs to be a potential apocalypse.

Also stupid: the title. It's as if The Maltese Falcon had been called The Bundle. Or Indiana Jones had been introduced via Raiders of the Wooden Crate. Billy Wilder's The Building. You get the idea. 

* A vaguely misogynistic subtext, seemingly inspired by Eve and the serpent, runs through every incarnation of this tale. (After watching the film, I read Matheson's story and watched the Twilight Zone segment. Took less than half an hour, combined.) Kelly, to his credit, downplays Arthur's disgust at Norma's decision, but subsequently chooses to have his invented previous husband emphasize that the women are the button-pushers, stopping just short of muttering "Fuckin' chicks." (Dude then gets pulverized by a snowplow, but still.)