Trading it all for what’s in the box (Trailer Watch: The Box)

Richard Kelly shot to cult film notoriety as the acclaimed first-time director of the creepy 2001 indie hit Donnie Darko. Luckily for him his reputation in the cinema-going public (less so the studios) remained intact despite a disastrous follow-up feature, Southland Tales, an ambitious but deeply flawed futuristic wannabe epic starring Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) as an action star stricken with amnesia. To the surprise of everybody (including Kelly) the film was accepted by Cannes, where critics promptly tore it to pieces and Sony reportedly leaped towards clauses in its distribution deal.

Here’s a quote from Roger Ebert’s review:

“After I saw the first cut of Kelly’s “Southland Tales” at Cannes 2005, I was dazed, confused, bewildered, bored, affronted and deafened by the boos all around me.”

The film eventually grossed around US$300,000 in America from a budget of US$18 million. In case you’re numerically incompetent that’s like, not good. From what I can remember (I spent half of the running time snoring on the couch) it was iffy stuff indeed but also strangely visionary in a bold but trite, bite-off-more-than-you-can-chew kinda way…

Anyhow, Southland Tales’ paltry audience may have been a blessing in disguise as Kelly can now move onto his next feature relatively unencumbered by the last. Enter the prosaically titled The Box, a horror/thriller with a trailer (watch it below) freshly premiered on this ‘ere internet.

The story tells of a crying-poor-but-still-living-in-a-really-swanky-house middle class couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) who are hungry for cash and frightened by the idea of  moving. One day an unlabelled box arrives on their doorstep; they open it up and take out a mysterious device that looks like a complicated version of the bullshit buzzer. Shortly later Frank Langella (nominated for an Oscar earlier this year for his terrific performance in Frost/Nixon) also arrives on their doorstep, apparently missing a large chunk of the left side of his face. He tells Diaz that if she pushes the button two things will happen: “first, someone somewhere in the world whom you don’t know will die. Second, you will receive a payment of one million dollars.”

Oooooh, sounds scary, and very much reminiscent of W.W. Jacobs’s classic miracle-with-repercussions tale The Monkey’s Paw. The Box also looks awfully schlocky, so we’ll tentatively label this one as ‘approach with caution.’ But we’ll see how Kelly goes: he has some ground to make up, even if general audiences may not realise it.