The Box

Originally published on 16/04/23 on Letterboxd

Obviously had high expectations for purely its conceptual commitment going in, but even seeing Southland Tales couldn’t have prepared me for the immensity of what Kelly accomplishes here- not a mere pastiche of The Twilight Zone and the 70s conspiracy thriller, but a magnificent synthesis of the theological and the ruthlessly scientific that, at its best, recalls the spirit of Le Guin and PKD’s most pioneering works. Donnie Darko alone cements Kelly as invaluable fundamental to the cultural fabric of the 2000s, but the casting of Marsden and Diaz in this is the sort of master stroke that could only originate from operating not in opposition to or separate from, but in faultless cohesion with the syncretism of genre and the spectres of genres long gone. Both performers have never been granted a broader palette of expression than they have here, and it is through their transplantation-as inextricable figures of romcoms and studio comedies- that the vice grip of suburban repression and consumerist dogmatism that consumes them is as much a prison of genre as it is of militarised culture.

But even beyond its manipulation of genre, there’s an incredibly painful undercurrent of something resembling an existential schizophrenia both here and across Kelly’s oeuvre- it’s what makes the third act of Southland Tales (or at least whatever exists resembling a third act in something that resists structural classification as much as that film does) pulsate with such aching, unplaceable longing in a manner not dissimilar to Sartre, who Kelly so pointedly renders the philosophical foundation of The Box. It is the terrible freedom granted to man once he comes to the bitter realisation that behind the veil of conspiracy, beyond all the theorising of the tendrils of extraterrestials and the hypothesis of the Baudrillardian simulation, there is utter, indecipherable abstraction, and it is only with the very absence of any real faith in these parables that he may arrive at some sort of reckoning with what it means to die- from the proclamation that every living thing creature on this earth dies alone to admission that there are only 2 ways to enter the final chamber: free or not free.

Had he not been so maliciously misread and dismissed by the general populace 14 years ago, Kelly could have become the 21st century’s John Carpenter- he’s already reached that point by virtue of making 3 indisputable masterworks that will only get their due decades after they’re released. I can only hope that we might listen the next time he holds up a mirror to the tragically absurd hole we’ve dug ourselves into.