Avis Metacritic

The Box is a mess, but it's a curiously haunting, intriguing, brain-tickling mess, and it delivers that "Donnie Darko" feeling in truckloads. Or should that be rocketloads?

This movie kept me involved and intrigued, and for that I'm grateful. I'm beginning to wonder whether, in some situations, absurdity might not be a strength.

The revelation of the film's mystery just barely makes sense. Yet, we dismiss it as an extended MacGuffin, and thus can delight in the film's devious turns.

Kelly's trademark mix of sci-fi, surrealism and suburbia occasionally entertains.

What a shame that Kelly's pacing doesn't run as fast as his imagination. Instead of sweeping you along, The Box just sits there like something unclaimed at lost and found. Damaged goods.

Sincere and sinister and inevitably ambitious, a serious work that insists on its own seriousness even when it edges toward the preposterous.

Kelly is devoted to telling his stories visually -- except when he's not. And the second half of The Box, unfortunately, underscores everything Kelly, as a filmmaker, wants to be and just can't.

An artistic fiasco that cuts across genre lines and all logic to become, perhaps, an instant midnight movie.

The characters in The Box are like cardboard cutouts: Some have "foolish victim" labeled on them, and others fall into the category of absurdly creepy villain.

What the plot doesn't decimate, the film's slower-than-a-clogged-drain pacing does. Sadly, this is one box that's just not worth picking up off the porch, much less opening, not even for a million dollars.