The Box, the new horror-ish film by Donnie Darko writer-director Richard Kelly, is mostly concerned with horrible things such as free will, malevolent electricity, ritualistic alienation, and the extermination of the human race. However, it is also, tangentially, a Christmas movie. Early in the film, suburban husband and wife Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) are getting ready to sleep; Norma tells Arthur to turn off the Christmas tree lights. A bizarre smile spreads across Arthur’s face: “But I like to leave them on! It keeps the Christmas spirit alive while we sleep!” Norma points out that this could cause the house to burn down during the night: “We could die.” Arthur appears to become serious: “Everyone dies.” Norma smiles, kisses him goodnight, and leaves. Arthur smiles and turns off the Christmas tree lights.

Norma, Arthur, and their son, Walter, interact this way, with coded sarcasm and affection wrapped in cynicism. Walter makes precocious wisecracks at breakfast; Norma sends Arthur off to work with a cheery “I hate you,” and he replies, “I hate you, too.” Kelly doesn’t hate these people or sneer at them for their strangeness; he takes care to reveal, at key moments, that their arch attitudes conceal much love and tenderness.

However, it seems unlikely that he thinks very much of them, all in all. The film suggests that Kelly might actually take that sentimental notion mocked by Arthur, “the Christmas spirit,” seriously—not because the film even hints at the hope for human transformation and goodwill (as in A Christmas Carol), but because it treats the absence of that hope as the object of overflowing, hysterical menace. In many ways, Kelly’s style and themes recall David Lynch; in particular, the vicious circle of a narrative recalls Lynch’s morbid Lost Highway. Like Lynch, Kelly is fascinated with turning the mundane into the mystical. Yet for Lynch, the “normal” is automatically suspect, and “nice” things are mostly hiding places for evil. By blurring the distinction between dark and light, corrupt and pure, kind and cruel, Lynch casts doubt on everything. What is radically un-Lynchian about Kelly’s worldview is that evil actually leads to evil and good to good; in a fundamental sense, behind all the hallucinations and trickery, things are what they seem. Lynch’s films tend to be fatalistic, suggesting that we can’t really know or control the evil within us; The Box derives its horror from the suggestion that the evil we do is, in fact, pathetically recognizable and preventable.

The set-up is simple: Norma and Arthur receive a box from Arlington Steward (the venerable Frank Langella), an eerily charming old man with a hole burnt in his cheek. Steward informs them that if they press the button on top of the box, two things will happen: a person they don’t know will die, and they will receive a million dollars in cash. What follows is far from simple. Kelly smashes together elements of melodrama, horror, conspiracy thriller, and science fiction, all vibrating within a ruthlessly mannered visual sensibility. The result is exhilarating, confusing, and preposterous.

It is also extremely logical. Arthur works for NASA, and he is fixated on “the Mars project.” Marsden plays him as a manly blank slate, with a tiny glimmer of fanaticism. He has littered the basement with colorfully creepy maps and space-images, including a poster with the words of Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” As Arthur is drawn deeper and deeper into the network that lies behind the box and its power, this lust to unlock some code, to discover the secret formula somewhere between magic and science, colors everything; for him, the movie is a film noir plot where the Maltese Falcon is Knowledge. Langella’s ominous gentleman warns him, gently and repeatedly, to stop playing detective.
Norma is a schoolteacher; we observe her lecturing on Sartre’s No Exit. She seems to vacillate between a Sartre-like existentialist loathing of the Other, as when she appears to recoil at the sight of Langella’s warped face, and a powerful emotional warmth, as when she later explains to Langella that she felt great love when she saw his disfigurement. Diaz is appealing, and we have to believe that Norma is a wonderful mother when, above Walter’s whining protests, she gives him a big kiss before he gets on the bus. Yet she seems to regard Walter with a kind of fear and suspicion at key moments. When she desperately asks Langella what they ought to do, he advises her to “follow your conscience,” then, in an ironic tone, adds that perhaps she should look to Sartre for answers.

So Langella’s Arlington Steward is the voice of conscience, the weary prophet of calamity, the one who sits in judgment. However, there is something lacking there, perhaps deliberately. Langella, for all his grave presence, feels more like a robot than a moral guide. Near the end, he tells Arthur and Norma, very slowly, “First I want to say that I admire you both immensely… but I do wish you hadn’t pushed that button.” His voice is authoritative and chilling; you know that what he says is true, but he drains from you the will to believe it.

Still, this is the god that Arthur and Norma have chosen: philosopher and scientist, existentialist and experimenter. Like any excellent horror film, The Box makes you fear for the world you already know—reminds you how truly strange it is. Things that are normal in the best way are transformed hideously, not because it is bad to be normal, but because we require them to match our strangeness. Kelly envisions a modern world running in vicious circles, asking terrible questions and getting terrible answers. A Christmas Carol proclaims to us that, with a change of heart, everyone in the world can be our family. With equal boldness, The Box insists that if we are not all family, we are all strangers.