The Box

"Donnie Darko" made him a wunderkind. "Southland Tales" made him a pariah. And writer/director Richard Kelly is now back with his third film, "The Box," of which the bones and backstory make it look like a safer bet for someone trying to work his way back into the good graces of studios, critics and audiences. "The Box" is a big-studio, big-star take on a taut, tight tale by a modern master of the miniature macabre story, Richard Matheson, with a strong, simple, slithery plot hook: A young couple, Norma and Arthur Lewis (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) are given a package by the mysterious, mutilated Arlington Steward (Frank Langella). Inside is a box with a bright red button under a glass dome. As Steward explains (and in Langella's silky, rippling tones, Steward's exposition sounds like the cool, calm voice of unreason), if they press the button, they'll receive a million dollars. Cash. And someone they don't know will die.

If this sounds like a cool "Twilight Zone" episode, well, that's because it was, in 1986 for the new "Twilight Zone." Matheson was a master of the "Zone" form -- with 16 episodes of the original show to his credit, plus the re-vamped series version of "Button, Button," the short story that Kelly turned into "The Box." But watching "The Box," you can feel where Kelly's stuffed Matheson's tiny tale of terror with padding to make the story fill nearly two hours, and you can see under all of the special effects, the '70s setting and slow creepy dread how, yes, "The Box" might have worked far better as a smaller package. And if you go into "The Box" knowing Kelly's previous films, you can't help but notice that while he understands how to move a camera and plot a scene, he doesn't know how to keep himself from having "The Box" return to the same tones, themes and ideas he's already given us. The shimmering waves of power that mark tenuous tears in the world, creepy dark-haired young men who hunch their shoulders and shoot a scary smile into the camera, the phrase "vessel" -- they're all here, just as they were in Kelly's other movies, and all building to a similar finale where a hero has to choose between bad and worse, between one tragedy and one far greater.

And I don't mind Kelly giving us sci-fi riffs on "Sophie's Choice," but I do object to how that's all he seems to want to do. A peer of mine noted how if "The Box" doesn't catch on with audiences, which seems likely, it may mean that Kelly has to direct someone else's script next time, and that may be exactly what he needs -- a chance to be liberated from his own obsessions and just relish telling someone else's story. And "The Box" demonstrates that Kelly is still a good director: There's a lot of great technical stuff here, from the pitch-perfect '70s look of the Bicentennial-year Virginia suburbs to the use of effects, to the retro, rousing score by The Arcade Fire's Win Butler, Owen Pallett and Régine Chassagne, with blaring horns and slashing strings and malevolent melodies and chilling chords.

But when Kelly organizes the film around his tics and topics, "The Box" feels shoddily constructed. Diaz and Marsden give good performances as normal people in extraordinary circumstances, and Langella's Steward is a custom-tailored terror with a ruined face over an inhuman heart. "Please don't let my appearance frighten you," Steward calmly tells Norma. "I'm not a monster; I'm just a man with a job to do." Of course, men with a job to do are the monsters of the 20th century, and it might have been nice if Kelly had dug into that -- or, for that matter, used the hook of the million in cash a bit more decisively. The payoff, once delivered, goes into a safe and is never seen again. The money's the point in the Matheson story; it's just window-dressing for Kelly -- a stop on the way as Kelly brings NASA and the NSA together and the conspiracy the Lewis family is trapped in stretches from the suburbs to the outer limits. Kelly goes down familiar roads until the tight grip of unease and terror the film creates goes curiously slack. "The Box" looks like a fairly nifty package of premise and paranoia until Kelly unpacks it, and a lot of both the fun and fear go out of the film as you feel it stumble towards the finish line and realize it's stuffed with recycled goods.