Release Date: November 6, 2009

(out of 4)

"The Box" might remind you why you love suspense and hate suspense at the same time. Richard Kelly’s film keeps you in suspense until you are pleading with it to tell you more. But you may hate it because you are wondering if the damn this is ever going to pay off. After awhile you get the sense that Kelly’s film is going to be one of those ambiguous ones, and certainly ambiguity is one of those trademarks a cinephile can enjoy. But the mind-teasing conundrum of this uncommonly weird studio movie teeters dangerously to the point of not wanting it to be so damn ambiguous.

This strange disfigured man in a black coat shows up at the door. He delivers a box with a glass dome lid covering a big red button. Arthur and Norma Lewis (James Marsden and Cameron Diaz) have 24 hours to decide whether to push the button. If they do, they will inherit $1 million dollars tax free. But elsewhere in the world someone random they do not know will die as a result. The two of them never seem to ask the right questions about the box and its circumstances until after stranger Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) has left.

The Virginia couple, of this 1976 setting, complains about finances but lives in such a nice house that you have to assume that they are living wealthily just beyond their means of income. Arthur is an optics designer for NASA and Norma is a respectable teacher. But things could be better just like things could be better for any person belonging to the human race. They argue whether the box is a hoax, a prank. They also muster reasons as to why all that money will solve their problems for now as well as for the rest of their life. Which one of them will end up pushing the button?

So here’s this Richard Kelly guy, the writer-director, who previously made such idiosyncratic sci-fi as “Donnie Darko” and “Southland Tales.” He creates a number of visual motifs such as secondary characters bleeding from the nose and stone-like faces staring at the Lewis’ from afar. He is a director obsessed with portals – when a character must guess the gateway to “salvation” or to “damnation” you might be confounded by which entrance was chosen. This is a director that not only quotes Jean-Paul Sarte and Arthur C. Clarke, but constructs a homage reminiscent to the final scenes of “2001: A Space Odyssey” while he’s at it. The imagery is startling and breathtaking, and then sometimes just nonsensically weird. What’s with the warehouse with a walk line of white lights actually leading to?

Strip away the spooky, cryptic elements and you have two fairly good lead performances by Marsden and Diaz bringing the right amount of guilt and vulnerability to their performances. Langella, as the sinister puppeteer, does an exceptionally good job in delivering his dialogue with equal measures of persuasiveness and supremacy. He’s the kind of man who dodges matters and concerns of others with his ability to swing the dialogue his way. Then there is the briefcase full of money as a plot catalyst only to put the whole idea of money in the forgotten background. That’s the thing about movie characters receiving large sums of money they didn’t earn. Once they have it they don’t need it anymore. Good health is the highest basic priority, isn’t it?

“The Box” is adapted from a Richard Matheson short story “Button, Button” from long ago. The original Matheson story is simply an intriguing set up and then culminated by a wry punchline. It’s a story that can be read in about five minutes. Matheson was a great writer, but Kelly is as much a respectable talent (whether you like his work or not) and especially here where he had to do a lot of creating in order to expand and amplify Matheson’s miniaturized story to feature length. Kelly has such a gripping sense on science fiction that an example of his storytelling gift is when he concocts an indelibly imaginative subplot explanation on the reasons on how Norma’s foot was maimed during a freak occurrence in her teenage years.

Kelly’s movie however walks that tightrope between curiosity and tedium, and I was constantly hard-pressing to bridge the symbolism together. I honestly don’t know if I can say I liked the movie or not until I see it again. But the fact that I want to see it again says something, right? If you have the same kind of gravitation towards ambiguous puzzle movies you might just want to put up a fight to see “The Box.” What a weird movie. Big-budget studio movies are rarely this weird.