A mysterious stranger (Frank Langella, left) offers Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz) and her husband a box that will provide them with riches, but will kill someone each time they use it in Richard Kelly's supernatural thriller The Box. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Richard Kelly may be the most imaginative filmmaker of his generation. He may also be its worst storyteller.

He’s certainly capable of creating stark, indelibly strange images, like the demonic bunny creature in Donnie Darko (2001), the bloodied mug of Justin Timberlake’s grinning G.I. in Southland Tales (2006) or Frank Langella’s half-missing face in his latest film, The Box. That’s why it’s tempting to forgive Kelly for the exasperating storylines that surround such freakiness. Trying to parse his plots can feel like reading a graphic novel with half the pages missing. And trying to care about his characters only increases the potential for a migraine.

Richard Kelly may be the most imaginative filmmaker of his generation. He may also be its worst storyteller.

In the case of Donnie Darko, incoherence may have worked in the film’s favour. A moody, darkly comic take on the teen flick, Kelly’s indie debut became one of the decade’s hardiest cult movies partially because it was so bewildering. The Box is the 34-year-old director’s first film for a major studio and first since the disastrous reception of Southland Tales. A turgid thriller, The Box is ostensibly a more commercial-oriented project, but it turns out to be his most self-indulgent yet.

Kelly based his script on Button, Button, a 1970 short story by author Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) that also spawned a memorably nasty episode of The Twilight Zone. The Box shares little with either of its predecessors besides the creepy set-up, in which a stranger appears at a couple’s home with a box and some special instructions. If they press the button on the box, two things will happen. The first is that they will receive a suitcase filled with cash. The second is that someone they do not know will die, and they will be responsible. It’s an ethical conundrum that would boast equal appeal to a game theorist and Edgar Allen Poe.

The recipients of this bizarre proposal are Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) and his wife, Norma (Cameron Diaz), who live in Richmond, Va., in 1976. Money troubles and career disappointments have made them vulnerable to the offer, made by Arlington Steward (Langella), a mystery man with a horribly disfigured face. Their decision draws them into a conspiracy that seems to involve just about everyone they know. (Michael Douglas’ character in the similarly paranoid 1997 hit The Game would surely sympathize.)

Arthur (James Marsden, left) and Norma Lewis discover that using the box brings financial wealth, but with disastrous consequences. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Kelly draws on elements of his own Virginia upbringing to expand the slim source material. These touches add some texture, but his attempt to fill out the back half of the tale with another of his apocalyptic science-fiction scenarios is disastrous. What happens once Arthur and Norma are done with the box is just about anyone’s guess — it has something to do with Arthur’s work at NASA on the Viking probes, lightning strikes, inexplicable nosebleeds, alien intelligence and a watery vortex like the kind Donnie Darko used to see around his bunny visitor.

All this takes place in an oddly airless environment comprised of too-perfect period décor and dotted with cultural references both lowbrow (e.g., a clip of What’s Happening! on the TV) and high (clumsy references to Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic existentialist play No Exit). The film’s veneer of gravitas is enhanced by the gliding, Kubrick-style camerawork, as well as an intriguing but often intrusive score by Arcade Fire power couple Win Butler and Regine Chassagne with Final Fantasy’s Owen Pallett.

The fact that all the characters act as if under heavy sedation is one reason The Box makes for such laborious viewing. Another is that Kelly fails to equip the film with any of the qualities that made his previous plots endurable. Nowhere will you find Donnie Darko’s humour or ability to inspire empathy. Nor are there any traces of the manic energy that made Southland Tales a ride worth taking.

What’s also missing is any of the power packed into the premise in Matheson’s story. It’s hard to care whether Arthur and Norma will decide their financial gain is worth a stranger’s life when nothing about them or their world seems real.

The Box opens Nov. 6.

Jason Anderson is a writer based in Toronto.