The MixTape podcast · Movie Review Podcast

The Box ''2009'' film

March 9, 2026·1 hr 9 min·4 clips

This week: The Box, from the director of Donnie Darko - an absolute masterpiece.

Dean opens by introducing The Box as a 2009 Richard Kelly movie and points straight back to Donnie Darko as the obvious comparison. He and Marcella frame the show as a screenwriter's take on films, then lay out the basic premise of a mysterious box that gives a couple a million dollars if they open it. The hook is nasty. They spend time on the classified-style opening text about Arlington James Stewart and the Mars project, and that cold open sets the tone for a movie that wants to feel half government file and half nightmare. Arthur and Norma take over. From there, the episode follows the film into a classroom insult, a party encounter, and the return of the kid who mocked Norma's foot, which becomes exactly the kind of scene that makes the hosts bristle and then start unpacking why it is there. The nosebleeds get attention. Marcella keeps pointing out how those strange interruptions around Arthur and Norma make the story feel less and less stable, while Dean keeps pulling the discussion back to what the scenes are doing structurally. The movie gets weird fast. By the time the rearview mirror peace sign shows up, they are both reading the film as something closer to The Twilight Zone than to ordinary thriller logic, and that comparison helps them explain why the movie feels memorable and a little unhinged. They are not gentle about it. The hosts like the concept a lot, but they also say the story needs more context and more support if its science-fiction weirdness is going to land cleanly. That argument has teeth. The back-and-forth keeps circling setup, payoff, audience alignment, and the practical question of whether the film is earning its mystery or just tossing strange objects at the wall. Then the comparison shifts again. Once they land on X-Files as the cleaner reference point, the episode settles into a groove between nostalgia, genre logic, and the absurdity of a movie that can feel like a TV nightmare stretched to feature length. The ending talk is blunt. When they get to the choice at the center of the story, they appreciate that the film refuses the obvious move and pushes the dilemma somewhere uglier and more interesting instead of settling for a neat moral checkbox. Nothing here is polished. It is a loud, loose, funny, profanity-heavy hang that works best for people who want craft talk with bite, movie-nerd arguing, and two hosts who actually care where the story breaks.

As heard by us

A blunt screenwriter's take on The Box that keeps asking for more context.

Dean Stark and Marcella Inastroza look at The Box like screenwriters first and movie watchers second, starting with Richard Kelly's classified-text cold open and the million-dollar choice at the center of it.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For when you want a profane, screenwriter's-perspective breakdown of The Box.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The MixTape podcast