The Box



The Box is a 2009 science fiction/horror film based on the 1970 short story "Button, Button" by Richard Matheson. It was written and directed by Richard Kelly.

It starts out with a simple premise -- a married couple, Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz) and her husband Arthur (James Marsden), receive a visit from a man with a severely burned face named Arlington Steward (Frank Langella). Despite his frightening appearance, Steward is cordial towards them, simply telling them that he has given them a box with a single button on it. He tells them that, if they push the button, they will receive $1 million in cash but a person that they don't know somewhere in the world will die. He refuses to release any more information than that about the nature of the box or his employers. He then leaves them for 24 hours to make a decision.

The film specializes in being a Mind Screw production, though it does a lot more to make sense of its mental games than most other films in the genre.

The story "Button, Button" had previously been adapted into a 1985 episode of The Twilight Zone.

This film includes examples of:

 * Adaptation Expansion: From five pages of story into one hour of television into two hours of cinema.
 * Aliens Are Bastards: The reason they were given the box? It's  Yeah, good job testing high moral standards while being less than upstanding yourselves.
 * Especially since the movie reveals the  to try forcing the subjects into pressing the button.
 * Black and White Morality
 * Brainwashed:
 * Crapsack World
 * Fantastic Aesop: If you're offered the choice of money via murder, don't take it. You will ultimately really regret your choice, . Of course, if you know there's no repercussions, go right ahead.
 * Friends Rent Control: Several people have pointed out that if the protagonists needed money, they could simply move from their massive house to a smaller place or sell one of their cars instead of fiddling with the murder box. However, you could argue that we were meant to see them as selfish jerks.
 * This was averted in The Twilight Zone adaptation of the story where the leads live in a really crappy apartment.
 * Gender Flip:
 * Here We Go Again: The ending.
 * Humanity on Trial:
 * Inferred Holocaust:
 * Pop Star Composer: The score is by Win Butler and Regime Chassagne of Arcade Fire and Owen Pallett.
 * Red Right Hand: Mr. Steward's half burned face, which despite his lack of malice, is still played straight.
 * Sadistic Choice: The obvious first one is bad enough--miss out on $1 million (and it's clearly shown they're not in good shape financially) or be responsible for someone's death. But it's the later one that really qualifies:  The husband tries to Take a Third Option, i.e. shoot the one forcing him to make the choice, but that person explains that he would then suffer the consequences of both choices, that is to say   those he answers will just send somebody else to replace the dead guy]].
 * And the last choice isn't even really in 's hands:
 * Oddly enough, that's a good thing, because
 * Schmuck Bait: The button. The original story was on that page long before the movie was conceived, so this is a no brainer.
 * Sufficiently Advanced Alien
 * Unfortunate Implications In  Box choices we see, it is the wife who , maybe represents Eve eating the apple but still comes across as women make silly, sudden decisions without thinking.