The Box (15.)
Directed by Richard Kelly.
Starring Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella, James Rebhorn, Holmes Osborne, Sam Oz Stone. 115 mins.
As old chestnuts go, there can be few older than the one about what would you do if you were offered £1,000,000 to press a button, knowing that as a result someone you didn’t know would die somewhere in the world. It’s the basis for a short story and Twilight Zone episode by Richard Matheson, called Button, Button.
It's an old 'un, but it's a good 'un. So you have this solid, well established material in one corner. In the other you have a young director called Richard Kelly, who made one of the most audacious debuts of the decade with Donnie Darko and then followed that up with one of its most extravagant flops, the sprawling, whacked out mess Southland Tales.
When it was announced that he was making a film of Matheson’s story, the obvious assumption was that this would be his calm, returning-to-the-fold, wearing-a-suit-and-tie-to-the-office, showing-he-can-be-responsible film, a way to prove that he could still be trusted. Oh no. The Box is slightly more conventional than his other films, the kilter is definitely set to off here, which is both a good and bad thing.
The big question film was always going to be, what do you do once you get to the end of Matheson’s original story, because there was never going to be enough to fill an entire film. Kelly's choice is to spin the story out in a kind of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers style conspiracy. He has set it in 1976 (Kelly is always very specific about the settings of his films) and filled it a kind of cold war paranoia.
When it works the film is genuinely chilling, but there are moments that are laughably bad. It isn’t just the bizarre story that will perplex audiences. Diaz and Marsden are the happily married couple who receive the offer but when the box with the button arrives they seem oddly blasé about it all; having set up this great moral quandary, it is barely discussed. The period detail and the performances have a superficial quality; it’s difficult to know what is supposed to be real.
When he made Darko, the comparisons with David Lynch seemed rather lazy, but this crucial third film reveals Kelly to be a film maker with a genuinely unique vision, brimming with ideas but with next to no quality control and a narrative sense that only intermittently coincides with what the audience needs. He does though have an oddly dutiful desire to explain himself to audiences – so rest assured it doesn’t leave you hanging, a full-ish explanation is coming.
Directed by Richard Kelly.
Starring Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella, James Rebhorn, Holmes Osborne, Sam Oz Stone. 115 mins.
As old chestnuts go, there can be few older than the one about what would you do if you were offered £1,000,000 to press a button, knowing that as a result someone you didn’t know would die somewhere in the world. It’s the basis for a short story and Twilight Zone episode by Richard Matheson, called Button, Button.
It's an old 'un, but it's a good 'un. So you have this solid, well established material in one corner. In the other you have a young director called Richard Kelly, who made one of the most audacious debuts of the decade with Donnie Darko and then followed that up with one of its most extravagant flops, the sprawling, whacked out mess Southland Tales.
When it was announced that he was making a film of Matheson’s story, the obvious assumption was that this would be his calm, returning-to-the-fold, wearing-a-suit-and-tie-to-the-office, showing-he-can-be-responsible film, a way to prove that he could still be trusted. Oh no. The Box is slightly more conventional than his other films, the kilter is definitely set to off here, which is both a good and bad thing.
The big question film was always going to be, what do you do once you get to the end of Matheson’s original story, because there was never going to be enough to fill an entire film. Kelly's choice is to spin the story out in a kind of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers style conspiracy. He has set it in 1976 (Kelly is always very specific about the settings of his films) and filled it a kind of cold war paranoia.
When it works the film is genuinely chilling, but there are moments that are laughably bad. It isn’t just the bizarre story that will perplex audiences. Diaz and Marsden are the happily married couple who receive the offer but when the box with the button arrives they seem oddly blasé about it all; having set up this great moral quandary, it is barely discussed. The period detail and the performances have a superficial quality; it’s difficult to know what is supposed to be real.
When he made Darko, the comparisons with David Lynch seemed rather lazy, but this crucial third film reveals Kelly to be a film maker with a genuinely unique vision, brimming with ideas but with next to no quality control and a narrative sense that only intermittently coincides with what the audience needs. He does though have an oddly dutiful desire to explain himself to audiences – so rest assured it doesn’t leave you hanging, a full-ish explanation is coming.
