L ike every self-respecting and preternaturally moody pre-teen at the turn of the millennium, I fell in love with Donnie Darko – the directorial debut of 20-something wunderkind Richard Kelly. I adored its puzzle-box quality, its bunny rabbits and time travel and romantic trauma, all soundtracked to Eighties hits I hadn’t heard back then. I think I also loved Kelly’s sprawling, political and deliriously confusing follow-up, Southland Tales, too – even if few others did. But it was The Box, Kelly’s third and, as of 2019, final film, that has lingered in my mind far more than his others in the decade since its release.

Built on a tight, intimidating moral conundrum, The Box slowly spirals into something far grander. It begins simply enough: Norma and Arthur Lewis, a suburban couple in 1970s Virginia and played by Cameron Diaz and James Marsden, are visited by a mysterious stranger with half a face (Frank Langella), who proposes an unusual game. He has a box in his possession, and if the Lewises press the button inside of it, they will be given a million dollars in cash. The catch? Someone neither of them know will die.

But then Kelly spirals outward. There are interdimensional gateways, aliens, God, and Diaz peeling off her sock to reveal a clubfoot – and all of it played so ambiguously that it’s not too surprising that cinema audiences found it infuriating at the time. CinemaScore exit polls at certain US screenings produced an “F” grade overall, landing The Box in the company of outright disasters like the Lindsay Lohan amputee thriller I Know Who Killed Me (2007), as well as notoriously polarising experiments like Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017). The Box also wasn’t the cut-and-dried, easy-to-follow mystery it was billed as. If anything, it was even more confusing than Kelly’s previous work. After The Box’s release, and its underwhelming box office gross of $33m, Kelly effectively disappeared.

“If there’s any wounds or psychological trauma associated with the films, that tends to get minimised over the years. It becomes a part of your life,” Kelly tells me from his office in Los Angeles. Speaking to Kelly is akin to speaking to a millennial, filmmaking JD Salinger, both men finding fame as authors of singular masterpieces about grouchy teenage loners, yet cloaked in mystery ever since.

Kelly isn’t quite as self-isolating as Salinger, happily indulging finickity questions and open about where things went awry, but he remains an ambiguous figure all the same. Kelly last did press in 2017, for the 15th anniversary re-release of Donnie Darko, and hasn’t talked about The Box since 2009. And for those who adored his inarguably distinctive voice in cinema, it’s been frustratingly absent for the past decade. There have been projects in development here and there, aborted directorial gigs and rumoured collaborations (including a true-crime mystery with Nicolas Cage) but nothing concrete. It would be ludicrous to get time with him and not ask him where he’s been hiding all this time.

The 40 best films of the decade Show all 40 1 /40 The 40 best films of the decade The 40 best films of the decade 40. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood A helter-skelter ride of a movie, satirical, very witty and showing its director’s immense affection for the B-movie actors, stunt men and hangers on who make up its cast. It’s also a tribute to Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Who would have believed that a film set just as the Sixties in LA turned sour could be so uplifting? Geoffrey Macnab Sony/Columbia/Rex The 40 best films of the decade 39. The Master The world isn’t scared enough of Scientology, but perhaps it would be if enough people had seen The Master. Paul Thomas Anderson depicts (a fictionalised version of) the cult as a trap for bruised masculinity. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix contort themselves into primitive creatures of greed and desire. It’s an ugly film, in the very best sense of the word. Clarisse Loughrey Snap Stills/Rex The 40 best films of the decade 38. The Irishman Scorsese summons all his sad captains for one last reunion in his magisterial gangster epic. De Niro, Pesci, Keitel and (newcomer) Pacino are all cast in a film as much about friendship, memory and betrayal as it is about corruption in the Teamster union or Mafia violence. GM Netflix via AP The 40 best films of the decade 37. Inside Out This is Pixar’s boldest and strangest animated feature. It takes us deep inside the mind of its heroine, 11-year-old Riley, where her unconscious is shown as akin to a magical theme park; emotions like Joy and Sadness feature as characters. Director Pete Docter deals with complex subject matter in a lithe and inventive way, and without too many Freudian hang ups. GM Moviestore/Rex The 40 best films of the decade 36. Shoplifters Hirokazu Kore-eda is like the Charles Dickens of contemporary Japanese cinema. He tells melodramatic family stories which would seem mawkish if they weren’t so brilliantly observed. Winner of the Palme D’Or in Cannes, this is one of his very best movies – a heart-tugging story about impoverished members of a makeshift family doing everything they can to survive. GM Thunderbird Releasing The 40 best films of the decade 35. Dogtooth Dogtooth is a grim tale of isolation, incest, cat murder and DIY dentistry. But Yorgos Lanthimos has a hidden superpower up his sleeve: the more off-putting his films, the more you get drawn in. His work breeds curiosity. We want to solve the mystery of these strange worlds and their cold, inscrutable characters. The fact that there are no answers keeps us coming back for more. GM Feelgood Entertainment The 40 best films of the decade 34. Edge of Seventeen Kelly Fremon Craig’s gorgeous if cruelly unrecognised The Edge of Seventeen is deliberately small in plot, with Hailee Steinfeld playing a grumpy teen horrified to discover her best friend is dating her older brother. But it is told with heartwarming urgency, reflective of the heightened, dizzying drama of merely being a teenager. Moviestore/Rex The 40 best films of the decade 33. A Quiet Passion Reclusive New England poet Emily Dickinson, who published only a handful of poems during her lifetime, is brought to life in vivid fashion by actress Cynthia Nixon in Terence Davies’s biopic. She may look like a spinster aunt but Nixon shows us her passion, mischief and her eccentric brilliance. Music Box Films The 40 best films of the decade 32. Frances Ha Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha is the definitive film about the quarter-life crisis, largely because it embraces the messiness of it all. We get the ups and the downs. We get the poorly-planned trip to Paris made by a young woman desperate to experience something profound. It’s a film without many dramatic conflicts, but marked by a gentle push towards accepting the inevitability of change. IFC Films The 40 best films of the decade 31. The Revenant Famous for its scene of Leonardo Di Caprio being mauled by a bear, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s western is part survival drama, part revenge movie. It’s a wilderness tale on the very grandest scale. From the opening massacre to the snowbound denouement, it if full of moments that startle you with their violence and their beauty. GM 20th Century Fox The 40 best films of the decade 30. Boyhood Shot over 12 years, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is the ultimate coming-of-age movie. It follows main character Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from when he is seven years old until he is a young adult. It’s a testament to the patience and ingenuity of Linklater and to the exceptional work of his cast (including Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke) that the film never feels phoney. GM Sundance Institute The 40 best films of the decade 29. Hereditary The horrors of Ari Aster’s occult contraption are matched only by the sheer volume of ideas crammed into it. A devastating kaleidoscope of stark images, mischievous easter eggs and pure, guttural horror, Hereditary asks a staggering amount of star Toni Collette, who wails and groans and weeps, as if conveying a full-body demolition in painful slow-motion. It is a performance for the ages in one of the best films in recent memory. A24 The 40 best films of the decade 28. Melancholia Kirsten Dunst is remarkable as a bride in the grips of mental illness shortly before the world ends. She conveys like few before her the surging apathy and bottomless self-loathing of depression, where everything, be it food or otherwise, tastes like ashes. The film that surrounds her is equally awe-inducing, distilling with grim elegance all of Lars von Trier’s polarising genius. AW Canal+ The 40 best films of the decade 27. Selma Selma is a masterclass in the historical biopic. Presenting a crucial moment in Martin Luther King Jr’s life without dramatic embellishment or emotional manipulation, it lets his legacy speak for itself, as Ava DuVernay wields her camera like a weapon of truth. Unabashedly political in its approach, Selma speaks plainly to the fact that society cannot pave its future without first understanding its past. CL Paramount/Rex The 40 best films of the decade 26. Boy Taika Waititi’s films always end with the feeling that things will work themselves out. It’s not blind optimism, but something far more comforting – he believes deeply in people’s ability to weather even the worst of storms. This is most apparent in Boy, still his best film to date, which catalogues a young Maori boy’s dawning realisation that his absent father isn’t the hero he imagines him to be. CL Transmission Films The 40 best films of the decade 25. Dunkirk British stoicism and grace under-fire are foregrounded in Christopher Nolan’s epic film about the Dunkirk evacuations. Nolan has a Cecil B De Mille-like genius for orchestrating crowd scenes and working with huge ensemble casts. He combines spectacle with very intimate moments that show the quiet desperation of the soldiers stranded on a French beach with little chance of escape. Warner Bros The 40 best films of the decade 24. Her Her felt almost uncomfortably relevant upon its release in 2013, and even more so today. Not because it shows people falling in love with artificially intelligent operating systems voiced by Scarlett Johansson, which hasn’t exactly caught on (...yet), but for what it said about modern loneliness. It is a sparse, oddly human film, Joaquin Phoenix finding solace and romantic fulfilment in sparkly new technology, before everything falls apart. AW Warner Bros The 40 best films of the decade 23. Call Me by Your Name Luca Guadagnino’s wonderfully evocative coming-of-age drama, set over a long, lazy Italian summer sometime in the 1980s, is notable for its frank but delicately observed account of the love affair between the precocious adolescent Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and the American academic, Oliver (Armie Hammer), who becomes part of the household. GM Warner Bros The 40 best films of the decade 22. Anomalisa It may be animated but few live-action films have captured middle-aged male angst and disillusionment as well as Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa. David Thewlis’s exceptional voice work brings an extra, sardonic edge to its portrayal of the businessman on a work trip to Cincinnati. Kaufman captures the man’s vulnerability, boredom and creeping disappointment about the course his life has taken. GM Paramount Pictures The 40 best films of the decade 21. The Social Network Described upon release as a lightly fictionalised account of the birth of Facebook, and as “hurtful” by Mark Zuckerberg himself, The Social Network was always spectacular, but its lessons have only deepened with time. It now resembles a terrifying warning about privacy, power, misogyny and the dangers of the internet, brought to life by David Fincher’s irresistibly cool direction, a characteristically snappy script by Aaron Sorkin and the dreamy, pulsating score by the now-ubiquitous Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It remains the most important film of the decade. AW Columbia The 40 best films of the decade 20. Black Swan It’s important to occasionally remind yourself that Black Swan, a bonkers, uncompromising and horrifying ballet thriller, somehow grossed $329m at the box office. But even removed from its staggering financial success, Darren Aronofsky’s psychological creepshow is a creative triumph. Part Showgirls, part Polanski and all Perfect Blue, it flirts with camp, Cronenbergian body horror and shaky-cam intimacy, with the deservedly Oscar-winning Natalie Portman as the twirling, crumbling creature at its centre. AW Moviestore/Shutterstock The 40 best films of the decade 19. Roma Roma takes two stories – one heartwrenching and intimate, the other sweeping and political – and weaves them together so delicately that they become one. It’s a tribute to the domestic worker who director Alfonso Cuarón says raised him. But it’s also the story of Mexico’s history, as seen through the perspective of those who have, for so long, been left voiceless. This is Cuarón’s masterpiece. CL Carlos Somonte The 40 best films of the decade 18. The Act of Killing It feels remarkable, given how easy it is to turn away from evil, that The Act of Killing exists at all. Not only did Joshua Oppenheimer choose one of the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide as his subject of his documentary, but he had him confront his own crimes through a series of cinematic reenactments. It is profoundly disturbing to watch. CL Dogwoof The 40 best films of the decade 17. Stoker Park Chan-Wook’s twisted homage to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt may be filled with beautiful things, but they’re laced with venom. When India (Mia Wasikowska) receives a visit from her enigmatic Uncle Charlie, she discovers they share a perverse kinship. Are they the same soul in two different bodies, or are they merely bound together by the stench of death that follows them wherever they go? CL Rex Features The 40 best films of the decade 16. The Selfish Giant Like Ken Loach’s Kes, Clio Barnard’s Bradford-set tale, very loosely inspired by the Oscar Wilde story, combines lyricism with polemic. It captures brilliantly the mischief and resourcefulness of its two young protagonists (teenage kids excluded from school) while laying bare the brutality of the society in which they and their families are cast adrift. GM Rex Features The 40 best films of the decade 15. Son of Saul In 'Son of Saul' Geza Rohrig plays a Hungarian-Jewish prisoner tasked with the extermination of his fellow Jews Sony Pictures Entertainment The 40 best films of the decade 14. Lady Bird Lady Bird – and its story of a frustrated teen (Saoirse Ronan) trapped in Sacramento, California – is deeply attuned to how we relate to memory. It’s less about particular events than the emotions they create: a flash of adolescent alienation, a tearful goodbye at the airport, or the sensation of seeing a familiar place through new eyes. A24 The 40 best films of the decade 13. The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson’s kitsch yarn, largely set in a luxurious spa hotel just before the Second World War, is an elegy for a lost world. Whether it’s Alexandre Desplat’s music, the eye-popping colours or the mannered but brilliant performances, all the elements here are perfectly judged. A film that could easily have seemed flimsy and conceited is instead utterly enrapturing. GM Moviestore/Rex The 40 best films of the decade 12. 12 Years a Slave Steve McQueen’s harrowing period drama confronts audiences with the reality of slavery. Racist white owners treat their slaves as if they’re livestock, not human beings. Chiwetel Ejiofor excels as Solomon Northup, the free man sold into slavery. The film has a furious polemical charge but also works as a terrifying Kafkaesque drama about a man who falls off the face of the world. GM Lionsgate The 40 best films of the decade 11. Under the Skin Scarlett Johansson tucking nervously into a slice of chocolate cake becomes one of cinema’s most humane and bittersweet moments courtesy of filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, whose once-in-a-blue-moon film projects have produced a trilogy of sinister classics. Like Sexy Beast and Birth before it, Under the Skin is a wild, beautiful pleasure, as haunting as it is tender and serenaded by a spindly, disquieting score by Mica Levi. AW Filmnation/Rex The 40 best films of the decade 10. 20th Century Women 20th Century Women is a small-scale comedy drama with the power of something bigger. A tapestry of restless lives figuring things out, it is about family, longing and feeling out of place. At its heart is Annette Bening, heartbreakingly empathetic as a woman out of time – too old for youthful bohemia and too young for her stuffy peers, and determined to raise her teenage son to be enlightened and brilliant. Rare is a fictional world so peacefully captivating. A24 The 40 best films of the decade 9. You Were Never Really Here Cinema is often at its most triumphant when it’s used as a tool for empathy, letting us climb into someone else’s brain and experience things that feel miles away from our own reality. That’s the revelatory power of Lynne Ramsay’s portrait of a PTSD-suffering vigilante, brought to life with incredible vulnerability by Joaquin Phoenix. Amazon Studios The 40 best films of the decade 8. Mad Max: Fury Road In a recent interview, Parasite director Bong Joon-ho revealed that he’d shed a tear while watching George Miller’s unexpected return to the Mad Max franchise. He called it “something we cannot describe with our words: all we can do is just cry”. He’s right. Fury Road is, essentially, a feature-length car chase – but it’s hard to put into words how epic and symphonic it truly is. CL Warner Bros The 40 best films of the decade 7. Paddington 2 A soothing balm for all of our socio-political ills, Paddington 2 is the film we needed more than any other this decade. There are numerous delights here, from the majesty of Paul King and Simon Farnaby’s script and its elaborate sleights of hand, to a moustache-twirling Hugh Grant at his most magnificent. But more than anything, Paddington 2 is about the healing power of community and family, a message conveyed with wholesome warmth and pluck by the achingly sweet bear of the title. Michael Bond would be proud. The 40 best films of the decade 6. American Honey It took a woman from Dartford to capture the sprawling, stirring power of the American road and all that it promises. Of all the decade’s films, Andrea Arnold’s American Honey feels the most hungry to exist independently on its own, ignoring the rules of storytelling and bursting at the seams with wildness and colour. Sasha Lane – who had never acted before she was spotted by Arnold on a beach during spring break – plays working-class teenager Star, who yearns for a greater purpose and hitches a ride with a truckful of kids as adrift as she is. AW Universal Pictures The 40 best films of the decade 5. Inside Llewyn Davis Inside Llewyn Davis is a kind of anti-Odyssey. In its story of a folk singer (Oscar Isaac) who hops from couch to couch, with no direction and few prospects, Llewyn becomes the weary Greek hero who not only struggles to find a way home, but realises he may not have a home to go to. It’s a deeply melancholic work. CBS Films The 40 best films of the decade 4. Phantom Thread Phantom Thread is a love story in a funhouse mirror – fizzy and feather-light, but with a barbed and kinky underbelly that could only have come from the mind of Paul Thomas Anderson. The bewitching duo of Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps play a fashion designer and his muse, who unearth new means to sustain their marriage. Anderson lingers over objects of beauty throughout – the lines of a fabric, the mess of a breakfast table, the colourful residue left over after the ball drops on New Year’s Eve. Apparently Day-Lewis’ final film, but what a blissful way to go out. AW Universal Pictures The 40 best films of the decade 3. Get Out Get Out sunk its teeth into culture in 2017, and hasn’t stopped biting. Jordan Peele’s horror satire is a polished, spooky and supremely well-executed chiller, but works even better as a deconstruction of race. In its sights are peak white centrism, the burdens and expectations of being black in America, and the untruths of the post-racial utopia many were fooled into embracing in the Obama era. No other film has reflected society in the 21st century more succinctly. AW Universal Pictures The 40 best films of the decade 2. Carol A magical reprieve from much of the queer romance canon, Carol is neither tragic nor sexually neutered, and is rich with snowy, expensive opulence. Todd Haynes’s 2015 masterpiece plays like a fairytale, kick-started by a misplaced pair of gloves, with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara acting on feelings that were considered unacceptable at the time. Deeply romantic, sexy and dramatic, it takes everything Haynes perfected in his Douglas Sirk-inspired drama Far from Heaven (2002), and maximises it. The 40 best films of the decade 1. Moonlight Barry Jenkins is destined to be one of the most important cinematic voices of the era. Moonlight is ample proof of that: there are very few debuts that feel this transportive, that fill the screen with this much raw beauty and human vulnerability. The director knows the power of gesture, and so the film’s emotional weight rests on a few shared glances, or one hand placed gently on another. In the intersection between race, sexuality and class, it crafts tender poetry. CL David Bornfriend/Kobal/Rex

“I didn’t expect things to take this long,” he says with a sigh. “I wish it would have happened faster and I could have got another movie off the ground much sooner, but I have not been idle. I’ve worked on a whole lot of movies that my name isn’t on. There have been opportunities that I’ve turned down, that I just didn’t think were right for me. But I’ve just been focused on a large volume of writing and putting together a bunch of projects. There’s a massive amount of stuff in the works, and hopefully at a scale that will let my imagination get on screen, with all the bells and whistles and the detail that people will hopefully want and expect from me. I don’t want to come back and underwhelm people. I want people to feel like it was worth the wait.”

First, however, he is looking back. “I have great affection for all three of the films that I’ve directed,” he tells me, his voice upbeat and swaggering. “I have this paternal love and affection for them, and that doesn’t go away over time.”

The Box, released in the UK 10 years ago this month, is the least probed of Kelly’s three movies. Donnie Darko has long been shorthand for cult filmmaking in the early 21st century, its following developing over time, and its plot endlessly dissected and analysed. Southland Tales has grown in recognition since 2006, too. An end-of-the-world epic with a large ensemble cast that included Dwayne Johnson as an amnesiac movie star and Sarah Michelle Gellar as a porn mogul, it was booed at that year’s Cannes Film Festival, savaged by critics and recut for a minuscule theatrical release in 2007. Today, however, it seems alert, distinct and creepily prescient. Kelly was warning of the uneasy, terrifying collision between Hollywood, politics and pornography years before Kim Kardashian and Kanye West were palling around in the White House, after all.

Cameron Diaz in the theatrical trailer for 2009's The Box

The Box, in comparison, has earned little of the same legacy, perhaps because it is assumed to be a much more minor creative endeavour. And at least for its first half hour, it very much is. As a film about a box, a button and a tantalising sum of money, The Box initially resembles a kind of genre spin on Indecent Proposal, inspiring the murkiest of questions in everyone watching. The film’s source material didn’t go much further. Loosely adapted from a 1970 short story titled Button, Button by I Am Legend author Richard Matheson, it was appropriately turned into an episode of The Twilight Zone in 1986. In Matheson’s original story, it ended with a twist: Norma presses the button and Arthur dies, the mysterious stranger informing her that she never truly knew her husband.

But Kelly subverted it, unfurling the fundamentals of Matheson’s story until it resembled a complex labyrinth about faith and fate, free will and destiny. Kelly says he was fascinated during the writing process by “panspermia” – the theory that all life on earth began from microorganisms in outer space – and duly wrote it into his script. There are additionally allusions to the Garden of Eden, the discovery of microbiotic life on Mars, and a secret society monitoring humanity. Who may also be aliens.

“As I tend to do,” Kelly laughs, “my ideas get bigger and bigger the more I develop something. But at the centre of this movie I did have a very simple conceit. I appreciated it, and after doing Southland Tales I did really want to just do a story about a husband and a wife – a story that focused on two characters who are brought this gift that completely transforms their lives. It’s a very specific and linear story, unless you really want to dig deep into the metaphysics of what you’re seeing. So I started with the simplicity, and then I just went in like a painter, and started painting in all these little details.”

It means The Box endlessly oscillates between horror and sci-fi, marital drama and conspiracy thriller. There are glimmers of The Parallax View, a dash of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Arthur steps into a giant blob of floating liquid in the basement of a library, and steps out into a flood of water that smashes down from above his marital bed. Things got even “deeper and crazier” originally, Kelly says, having shot between 35 and 40 minutes of additional footage that has never seen the light of day.

‘I was just grateful to be working at a big studio’: Kelly alongside Diaz and Marsden at the 2009 premiere of the film (Getty) (Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images)

“There was a whole teleportation sequence and chase sequence,” he says, “and a sequence in the third act where James and Cameron are taken to this massive nuclear facility, where there’s more tests and experimentation and it gets really wild.” He admits, though, that much of it was “definitely superfluous”.

“It was me playing and experimenting,” he explains. “I was continuously making revisions to the script as we were shooting. Which is not something I would probably do [now]. I’ve spent the last decade writing and prepping tons of huge projects, so all my new scripts are really, really polished and they’re really put-together. I think on Southland Tales and The Box I was constantly coming up with and exploring new ideas and adding stuff. I’m known to just keep adding things in, because I just get so caught up in all the ideas that I’m trying to explore. My mind kept spinning and spinning and spinning.”

What is funny about all of this is that The Box was endlessly promoted as something far more conventional than it is, and certainly not one of the most daring studio movies in recent memory. In a New York Times feature ahead of the film’s release, The Box is described as “mostly straightforward [and] linear” and “deliberately calculated to be commercial”. Kelly confesses today that Warner Bros, the studio behind the film, indeed bent the truth a little.

‘We had a movie that they knew had a huge logic that I understood’: Cameron Diaz in ‘The Box’ (Warner Bros)

“We had a movie that they knew had a huge logic that I understood, but that they knew that general audiences were gonna struggle with,” he says. “I think their mandate was pretty simple, it was just, ‘Cut it as short as you can.’ I was contractually obligated to deliver it as 1 hour and 50 minutes [long], I think. So literally the mandate was: ‘Richard, we’re gonna release this just because we know we can sell the concept.’”

Along with the runtime stipulations, Warner Bros also refused to screen the movie at any festivals, despite invites from “some prestigious ones”, Kelly says. He says today that he didn’t have any problems with its decision-making. “I was probably still a bit traumatised about Southland Tales and everything I went through on that film,” he says, “so I was just grateful to be working at a big studio.”

He adds, however, that “there was this question mark lingering over the movie, like ‘What is it?’ None of my movies are easy to market, let’s put it that way. But this at least had that conceptual hook – of pressing the button and someone will die. They knew they could sell that in a 30-second TV spot, and that was what gave the studio confidence to go ahead and give us a wide release for it – for such an unusual art film.”

Even the film’s biggest defenders will concede that The Box is often too ambitious, that it feels like the work of a visionary still exploring and building his world, rather than something made with slick confidence. Roger Ebert loved it, but freely admitted that Kelly’s plot went “from A to Z using 52 letters”, while The Independent’s Nicholas Barber wrote that its “loopy ideas” meant it travelled “a long, long way from its original quandary”. It’s also a film that only becomes richer and more rewarding through multiple viewings – not inherently a bad thing, but asking a lot of your audience.

‘I think the audience has sort of evolved’: Richard Kelly with Jake Gyllenhaal on the set of ‘Donnie Darko’ (Dale Robinette/Flower/Gaylord/Adam Fields Prod/Kobal/Shutterstock)

What can’t be denied is that it embodies Kelly at his most directorially confident – he shoots on hazy digital, lending everything the look of being trapped in a snow globe, directs Diaz and Marsden to brilliantly human and warm performances, and recruited Owen Pallett and Arcade Fire’s Win Butler and Regine Chassagne to craft a paranoid, terrifying score reminiscent of late-night black-and-white horror movies.

That aforementioned score cruelly remains unavailable to buy or stream, and adds to a feeling that The Box has been unfairly forgotten. It’s especially frustrating when you see its influence on so many of the films we today recognise as modern horror classics. In its wake, a number of Twilight Zone-esque thrillers began populating cinemas, with Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us) launching an entire cottage industry of spooky and socially relevant horror movies, and Ari Aster’s Midsommar and Hereditary proving there is space in the marketplace for incredibly long and complex chillers. The Box, with its heightened mystery, surrealism and genre-bending, seemed to miss the boat.

“With everything that’s happened in the past decade, I think people are more amenable to disturbing and unusual puzzle-type movies,” Kelly says. “I think the audience has sort of evolved. Maybe we were just a little bit ahead of the curve?”

You also can’t help but think it proves that now, 10 long years after Kelly last brought one of his visions to the big screen, is the perfect time for him to make his comeback. He promises, with absolute certainty, that it’ll happen soon.