What’s in ‘The Box’?!? Why this cult sci-fi movie is still an intriguing mess after all these years

Richard Kelly is (or, more precisely, was) a polarizing figure in Hollywood. He only directed three movies during his career, the first being his 2001 cult classic Donnie Darko, which thrust him onto the global stage as an emerging filmmaker. But then came his sophomoric film, Southland Tales, in 2006. The movie was a trainwreck, albeit a gloriously absurd trainwreck, that was so confusing and clumsy it was booed at its Cannes premiere.

Then came Kelly’s third (and final?) film, The Box. Released in 2009, the movie starred Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as a down-on-their-luck couple with a young son. One day, a mysterious package arrives, revealed to be a box containing a singular button. The following day an even more mysterious man (Frank Langella) arrives to explain the rules. If they push the button, they get $1 million… but someone they don’t know will die. After a bit of debating, they decide to press the button.

From there, audiences dive into a plot involving outer space, lightning strikes, government conspiracies, mind control, the afterlife, and potentially aliens or religious deities (the film never makes it clear which one we’re dealing with). The Box received lackluster reviews and only grossed $33 million globally, becoming a box office bomb. The movie also serves as Kelly’s last feature film credit to date (though he has been claiming in interviews for the last six years that he has tons of upcoming projects).

Fifteen years after The Box’s premiere, the movie is still a murky, muddled mess. But in classic Richard Kelly style, it has some incredibly captivating aspects, which is why film fans are still talking about the movie after all these years.

The Box is a clunky, funky mess

Southland Tales Universal Pictures

I’ll be completely honest: I love Kelly’s previous film Southland Tales. I’ve watched the almost three-hour-long movie at least six times now, and absolutely love the zaniness of it. The problem is that I’m still not fully sure what its plot is. Southland Tales centers around a fictitious 2008 presidential election and encapsulates tons of issues that were part of the 2000s zeitgeist, like climate change, wars in the Middle East, and the rise of Fox News as a propaganda network. But it also involves the apocalypse, a future-predicting movie script, a porn star, parallel universes, exploding blimps, floating ice cream trucks, Bai Ling doing whatever it is Bai Ling does, and an epic musical number with Justin Timberlake.

My point is this: Southland Tales is an incomprehensible mess, but there’s so much insanity and hilarity happening around every corner that you can’t look away. It’s more circus than movie, and that’s wonderful. Unfortunately, The Box shares Southland’s confusing plot and bad acting… but it lacks the bombastic freak show that makes Southland Tales watchable.

Warner Bros.

Instead, it feels like Kelly wanted to be taken seriously this time around. It’s like he told the actors to make their performances more subtle, to make the plot reveals less grandiose, and to make the movie’s vibe feel more like a respectable thriller than a hoedown jamboree.

Unfortunately, by trying to make The Box look and feel like a convincing, respectable movie, Kelly showed what a truly awful filmmaker he is. Diaz’s performance is so subdued that I’m convinced she shot the entire movie on Xanax, and Marsden seems like he’s only there because of some contractual obligation.

Warner Bros.

The Box tries to act like the couple are conflicted over whether to press the button or not, but both Marsden and Diaz are so emotionless and stiff that the lead-up to the big “will they or won’t they” moment seems mundane and uninteresting. They basically decide to press the button during a quiet evening in the kitchen. “It’s just a box,” Diaz says.

Even worse, just like Southland Tales, after rewatching The Box I still can’t fully confirm what the plot is. [Editor’s note: the following contains spoilers for The Box‘s ending.] In the finale, the mysterious man has made their son deaf and blind, and Marsden must make a choice: Kill Diaz and go to jail, but give his son his senses back (but also dooming him to be an orphan), or enjoy the rest of their life with $1 million…but also with a child who is deaf and blind. Why the son ever got dragged into this ordeal is unclear since he had nothing to do with anything. Even more concerning, I’m still not entirely sure what events led to the finale in general.

In addition, Marsden goes to a library where there’s a bunch of mind-controlled humans. The library also has a swimming pool and a giant block of floating water that is a doorway to somewhere not clearly defined, and there’s something about Mars and a satellite picking up a signal that coincided to a lightning strike that somehow implanted something inside Langella’s mysterious man that makes him do what he does. It’s all very vague and very nonsensical.

The Box is a puzzle you still want to figure out

Warner Bros.

For some reason, despite how unquestionably bad the movie is, there’s still something about it that draws you in. And this is the one saving grace that Kelly has going for his career. I can’t explain what it is, it’s just some kind of je ne sais quoi within Kelly’s filmmaking style that makes you genuinely curious about what the hell is going on.

By all traditional rules of filmmaking, audiences shouldn’t care about Kelly’s films. They break every contract between filmmaker and audience imaginable — they waste our time, they’re sloppily put together, Kelly makes them for himself and not the viewer, and he remains completely unapologetic about his bad movies. We should hate him and not give him any of our time or money. But instead, I keep wondering what his movies are about.

I didn’t turn The Box off because, despite how bad it was — the hook was enough to snag me. I wanted to know why this box exists, why these people pressed the button, and how we ended up with a plot about conspiracy theories involving aliens (I think) and the afterlife (I think). Kelly has a way of asking questions that grab your attention. He can rarely deliver answers, but the man certainly knows how to draw you in, only adding to the quagmire that is his career. But perhaps that’s why it works? He gives us so little coherent information that his movies actually force our minds to run wild, desperately trying to connect the dots, with each viewer creating their own answers.

You should watch The Box at least once

Warner Bros.

Fifteen years after the movie’s premiere, is The Box worth watching? As much as I loathe the film for being both stale and confusing, I think all cinephiles should watch it at least once. The Box is loaded with great ideas, they’re all just executed terribly. But those ideas are enough to snag your interest and make you wonder what the deeper meaning is. And for that, I think Kelly, whether he intended to or not, did his job as a filmmaker.

The Box is streaming on Cinemax.