GRADE: B+

After seeing the trailers for this film, which were filled with snippets of a screaming Cameron Diaz and lots of alluding to high-octane frights, the last thing I expected was an emotionally nuanced, slightly surreal, adult morality tale. But that’s exactly what I found in “The Box,” director Richard Kelly’s moving, tension-drenched treatise on the current state of the human condition.

Perhaps one of the keys to understanding “The Box” lies in its surprisingly simple Faustian subtext, where a single human choice holds untold consequences. In this case, the choice is whether or not to accept a million dollars knowing that if you take the money, someone, somewhere, will die because of it.

That’s the choice given to Norma and Arthur Lewis, a successful Virginia couple with one young son, a big home, pricey cars and lots of expenses. Still, they’re a responsible, hard-working couple; it’s just that they’ve lived slightly beyond their means for several years and now the bills are beginning to outdistance their cash flow.

Things come to a head after Norma, a teacher at a costly private academy her son attends, learns that the faculty will no longer receive discounted tuition, putting her son’s education in jeopardy. That possibility becomes more likely when that same day Arthur finds out he has not been accepted into NASA’s astronaut corps, dashing his lifelong ambition and a much needed increase in salary.

Those setbacks occur concurrently with the discovery of a box on the Lewis’ doorstep one morning. Inside the plainly wrapped container sits another box; a simple wooden contraption with a large red button on top covered by a clear glass dome. What is it, and who left it on their doorstep?

That mystery is solved the following day when Arlington Steward, a former NASA employee now disfigured after being struck by lightening, arrives at the Lewis home with a surprising offer: push the button and receive one million dollars tax free. The only hitch—pushing the button will cause someone to be killed.

Steward assures Norma that whoever is killed, it will not be anyone she knows, but the consequences unsettle her. Deferring her decision, having been given 24 hours to decide, she discusses the offer with her husband. He’s against it—not adamantly—but the whole thing just doesn’t feel right to him.

Yet before the discussion plays out, Norma, it a fit of spontaneous desire, pushes the button. Like clockwork, Steward arrives with the couple’s million dollars, takes the box and bids them farewell.

Of course, that choice only marks the beginning of the Lewis’ journey into uncharted territory, the specifics of which would only prove to spoil the story; a story that soon becomes a life and death struggle with far-reaching ramifications for the Lewis family and the entire planet!

Twisting, turning, full of unexpected developments not necessarily decipherable, “The Box” is an extremely well-acted exercise with more than a handful of genuine fright and a story that, like Kelly’s other work (“Donnie Darko,” “Knowing”), is laced with dark undertones and an otherworldly presence.

Best of all, a seemingly straightforward plotline, based on the Richard Matheson short story, "Button, Button," is in reality a complicated, Hitchcockian style decent into the abyss that will keep viewers intrigued and guessing up to and after the film’s devastating climax.

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