It’s 1976 and picture perfect suburban couple Cameron Diaz and James Marsden (both excellent sports throughout) receive a mysterious device in the post. A dour visitor (Frank Langella) arrives soon after with an offer; if they press the button on the box, they’ll receive a million dollars. Oh. And somebody they don’t know will die.
Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly was never going to get through a rendition of the old Twilight Zone standard, Button, Button, without getting whacky. Mr. Kelly adds some unsettling and arresting details into the mix; Marsden works for NASA on the Viking Mars Probe project, Diaz has a deformed foot; but competing and increasingly weird developments soon crowd out the neat Richard Matheson story from which the film is loosely derived. Though never as eye-poppingly crazy as Southland Tales, The Box is similarly erratic. Sometimes it’s David Lynch on full throttle, elsewhere it’s The X Files with a flooded engine.