“The Box Man” is a 2002 short film created by Nirvan
Mullick.
Plot (SPOILERS)
A mysterious man in a trench coat is walking down the empty city
streets at night when he comes across a cardboard box at a street corner. When
he leans in for a closer look a pair of eyes appear from the slit of the box.
This startles the man and he runs away and into his apartment which happens to
overlook the box from the second floor. The man peeks through the blinds of his
window and finds the eyes are staring at him.
We see him grow restless as he faces the window. He takes
another peek and finds the eyes are still staring at him. The man then takes
out a gun he kept in his closet and aims between the pair of eyes. When the
eyes look at him, his aim becomes unsteady before firing.
After shooting at the mysterious creature the man walks over
to the box and lifts it up. He finds no one underneath but sees a trail of
blood drops leading into a dark alleyway. For a brief instant the camera faces
the man with the box in his hands looking down the alley and we can hear the mysterious
person’s heavy breathing as they watch the man from the darkness.
The man takes the box with him into his apartment and
watches it while sitting in his chair. He then walks over to the box and climbs
inside and we see his eyes appear from the slit of the box.
Mr. Mullick was inspired to create this short film by the
1974 novel of the same name written by Kobo Abe. This novel has an ambiguous narrator
and is about a man who lives in a box and spends his time spying on others.
There are a few common themes between this novel and the
short film. The main character, for one, had good reason to fear he was being
watched. This is a concern that seems to still be relevant today, and perhaps
even more so, as people are becoming more aware of what the technology we carry
in our pockets is capable of.
Are our phone conversations being recorded? Are our phones
constantly listening to us? Should we be losing sleep over this? Are we being watched?
The main character would argue “yes” to all of these
questions. And so this begs the question: why did he crawl inside the box? My
initial interpretation was that perhaps he wanted to understand the creature,
and thus his fear, better in order to overcome it. In the book, the narrator
claims there is a hitman out to get him as well as a doctor who desires to be a
box man himself. It is possible that Mr. Mullick combined these two characters
into the main character of his short film and the man became a box man in the
end.
“The Box Man” is one of those stop motion shorts that uses
simple settings and few props but delivers strong visuals, nonetheless. The
majority of the short film was silent- the few sounds were the man’s footsteps
and the gunshot, of course, as well as occasional eerie sounds of a harmonica
in the background.
I enjoyed the noir feel of this short film as well as the
ambiguity of the characters. The man’s fear and reasons for crawling inside the
box are open to interpretation and it is up to the audience to determine if the
man acted unreasonably. Putting hints from the novel aside, my key takeaway from this short is this:
We cannot overcome our fears without first understanding them. Because a fear
we have that we don’t understand is not a fear- it’s paranoia.
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