In the suburban Virginia home of Norma and Arthur Lewis, played by Cameron Diaz and James Marsden, the couple and their young son are preparing for Christmas. There are gifts under the tree and colored bulbs constantly dimming and relighting; Arthur likes to keep them on at night to keep the spirit of Christmas alive. One afternoon, as Norma is returning home from teaching Sartre to teenagers, a tall man in a long winter coat appears at the doorstep with a parcel wrapped in brown paper, his face disfigured from being struck by lightning some time ago. He introduces himself as Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) and speaks politely when he explains that inside the parcel there is a small wooden box with a button on top. If pushed, two things will happen: The Lewis family will receive one million dollars in cash, and someone they don't know will die instantly.

Little else is written about in Richard Matheson's itty-bitty morality tale "Button, Button" but much more is made of the internal (eternal?) conflict in Richard Kelly's excellent third feature The Box. Moving the setting from a Manhattan apartment to the suburbs of Richmond in 1976, Kelly has both excised much of the story's claustrophobia and added some healthy dollops of autobiographical text -- The director grew up in Richmond and Diaz's character suffers a horror story similar to one his mother lived through involving a disregarded x-ray machine. But the missing toes that Diaz exhibits in an early scene to a nosey student are one of the least odd things about Kelly's new film.

As might have been assumed, Norma and Arthur decide to push the button, and Mr. Steward returns with a briefcase full of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. They hide it in their safe and later, at an awkward rehearsal dinner, Norma gets her detective father (the reliable Holmes Osborne, a Kelly regular) to look up Steward's license plate. As Arthur and Norma stare down the rabbit-hole, the perch of reality begins to unravel: an epidemic of nosebleeds, suburban zombies, alien water, portals to other dimensions, kidnappings, the NSA and the Viking 1 spacecraft, all given Bernard Hermann-lite shading by The Arcade Fire's Win Butler, Régine Chassagne and Owen Pallett's chilling score.

The Viking 1 is of particular interest: Is there life on Mars? Kelly's father helped design the camera system on the spacecraft, nearly qualifying The Box as a self-reflexive experiment; some blissful, frightening world where Hitchcock remakes a Guy Maddin picture. As Donnie Darko, Kelly's superb debut, used Bush Sr.'s debates with Dukakis and the rise of self-help as a bed for apocalyptic forecasting and a grim spin on the director's own formative years, The Box employs the possibility of new life elsewhere as a reflection on our fiscal-first values, the decaying freedom movements of the '70s and, in particular, our attitude towards the future.

Indeed, while it quotes 2001 novelist Arthur C. Clarke's vague assertion that any advancement in technology is "indistinguishable from magic," The Box also evokes the great conspiracy films of the 70s (The Parallax View) and the totems of modern science fiction cinema (chiefly: Invasion of the Body Snatchers). But as with Kelly's last film, the widely despised, decade-defining Southland Tales, The Box never allows you to get your hands completely around it, despite being his most commercially viable work to date -- a fact that many critics dismiss as an inability of craft or, absurdly, as a bid to be difficult for difficulty's sake. Yes,The Box is crazy and convoluted, moody and melodramatic. But above all it is, in narrative and form, a mystery. And as Mr. Steward ominously declares near the end of the film, I like mysteries.