The movie, based on the short story “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson, features James Marsden and Cameron Diaz as Arthur and Norma Lewis, a young down-on-their-luck couple living in 1976 Virginia. After Arthur has been told that he will never realize his dream of becoming an astronaut at NASA, the mysterious Arlington Steward visits them. Steward, a horribly disfigured man, offers them a box and a specific set of instructions:

Inside the box is a red button; if pushed, a person they do not know will die. If they push it, they will receive a lump sum of one million dollars. If they do not push the button, Steward will retrieve the box and be out of their lives forever.

The couples struggles for hours with the moral implications of pushing the button and eventually make their choice. From there, all hell breaks loose as Kelly takes the story on a million different twists and turns that are worthy of a Hitchcock parallelism, and predictability quickly flies out the window.

Before the button pushing I found the story somewhat mundane and overly melodramatic. But after that fateful decision, Kelly enters into a filmmaking groove, putting together endless conspiracy theories concerning NASA and the NSA – all of which can be trailed back as a result of that fateful decision.

The score, done by the Arcade Fire, gives the film’s atmosphere a much-needed shot in the arm. It reminded me of the late seventies remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; though that is not the only comparison of these two films as the mobs of speechless mouth-agape “employees” of Steward seem almost xeroxed from the earlier film. While some in the audience found the “employees” laughable, I found them to be frightening and otherworldly, fearing their attack during every moment.

It doesn’t take much to notice the influence that horror and science fiction film of the late sixties, early seventies carried as there are several nods to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The frightening imagery, blustery cold Virginia setting and clever lightening were reinforced by a spectacular production design – a part of the film that will most likely go heavily unnoticed by most viewers.

The more I think about this film the more I enjoyed it. I feel that if viewed a few more times, it would warrant consideration as one of Kelly’s best films. The only problems that arose were its longevity, (I expected it to end on at least three separate occasions), Diaz’s horrid accent and its struggle to balance the dramatic elements with the scare tactics. Thankfully, the story does overcome these stumbling blocks, turning a potential sleeper into an exceptional well crafty film that honestly scared me more than most.