How to unwrap 'The Box'

After the undeniably complex "Donnie Darko" and the deliriously convoluted "Southland Tales," one would expect Richard Kelly's new film, "The Box," to be incomprehensible. But it's a delightfully simple film, at least by the writer-director's own standards, and it speaks to the way our moral choices can be shaped by time and social context.

Based on Richard Matheson's short story "Button, Button" (which was turned into an episode of "The Twilight Zone"), "The Box" tells the story of Arthur (James Marsden) and Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz), a couple living check-to-check in 1970s Virginia. Their lives change drastically with the arrival of a disfigured stranger named Arlington Stewart (Frank Langella), who presents them with a mysterious box. In the box is a button: If pressed, it will give the Lewises $1 million in cash. The catch? It will also kill an innocent person.

"The original story was a great setup for the first act of a movie," Kelly said. "It got my mind racing, and the questions about Mr. Stewart's origins and intentions that it poses made it pretty easy to formulate act two and act three."

Matheson's six-page story can be described as science fiction, but Kelly and his actors prefer to define it as a morality tale — a "what would you do?" scenario that speaks to the compromises we make every day.

"In today's society, we're proving that we're pushing the button more than ever by doing things that we don't think we'll have to take responsibility for, like polluting the environment and setting up credit cards," Diaz said. "What we don't realize is that we will have to suffer the consequences, and that's essentially what this film is about."

Perhaps that makes it grounded thematically in the amoral present, but "The Box" relies on a 1970s setting for its story to work. Kelly went to great lengths to accurately recreate the Virginia of his childhood. He focuses the plot around a NASA project that was taking place at the time, and even stocked an entire grocery store full of vintage products and signs. And it wasn't just nostalgia that compelled him to do it: He needed a different landscape.

"I decided to set the film in the 1970s because of the 'somebody/something you don't know' factor that existed in that decade," Kelly said. "Arthur and Norma clearly couldn't just go Google 'Arlington Stewart' to find more information about him or his company, and it's this mystery that propels the story along. The lack of modern technology makes the story even scarier."