“Welcome to the Blumhouse”, presented by Blumhouse Productions, is showering us with eight Horror/Thriller movies this October. Four of which can currently be seen with a subscription to Amazon Prime. (I’m still waiting for the announcement of the other four, they are building suspense!!)
"Black Box" came out October 6th as one of the first to be released from the octet, and was directed by Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour, his first full-length movie in the Director Chair.
I picked “Black Box” first out of the four available Blumhouse movies based off the preview. It seemed to be the most mysteriously intriguing, and I was not let down.
We follow the story of Nolan, played by Mamoudou Athie (last of whom we saw literally imploding from a crack in his deep-ocean suit in “Underwater”. Very unpleasant end to his character in that movie.)
In “Black Box” his character does not have things much easier. Nolan is the survivor of a horrific car accident, which killed his wife, and entirely wiped out his memory. He is struggling with trying to revive any trace of his memories and the life he before the accident. Nolan’s child, Ava, does the best a girl her age can do to help her father with the daily activities that you and I take for granted. She’s reminding him to go to work, when to pick her up from school, how to make meals.
Nolan forgets to pick his daughter up from her school, he doesn’t remember the wife he once had, loses the job he had and can’t seem to redeem any sense of normal life. So, things aren’t going very well for him.
Which is why he chooses to seek out alternative help, since all other avenues have not helped him with recovering any memory. This is where Dr. Lillian enters the story to use her experimental, obviously not-yet approved, treatment. She connects Nolan to her machine, of which provides us the name of the movie, the "Black Box". Basically, the treatment brings Nolan virtually into his subconsciousness and into three of his memories through some sort of meditative method used by the machine.
In Nolan’s first visit to his subconscious things get weird immediately. The first memory he experiences is the scene of his wedding day, up at the altar, dressed to the nines. Oddly, his wife has no face, it is blurry and haltingly unnerving.
And that’s not the scariest part. Not long after arriving to this memory he begins to hear loud creepy cracking sounds. From the crowd in the church, into the aisle, stumbles a person crab-walking backward toward him with joints, bones, everything crackling in chilling disturbing movements. The credits list this being as ‘The Backwards Man’. Whatever this thing is, it starts its way towards Nolan, painfully moaning and grunting all the way.
This entity does not appear to be there to shower the newlywed couple with kisses and gifts!
Provided a way for him to escape his subconscious memories, Nolan can enter and leave his memories with a click of the button. As the treatments continue, he experiences different memories, but the bone-cracking thing is there every time to confront him.
He starts to question his own reality as the memories in the black box don’t match up with the pictures he has from his real life. Nolan eventually realizes that he is in a battle for his memories, for his consciousness, and for his survival.
“Black Box” was really well crafted from start to finish. The writers did a great job in misleading the viewer through the mystery, and when twists were revealed they were done perfectly and with effective style. Thinking back through the movie, hints given to the truth of the story were provided with subtle ease. And yet, they were there.
They did a great job of building on the mystery beneath the surface of the movie. I also thought it was a very creative way to answer the question of manipulation of consciousness, relating to consciousness from someone who has died as well as from someone who is dying. What can be done with consciousness if saved/recorded in some way before the body dies? And if it were possible to record a person’s consciousness, what can be done with it? This movie addresses that.
I wouldn’t say "Black Box" is necessarily a Horror movie as you would think with paranormal events, but more of a Psychological Thriller. There are absolutely creepy hair-raising scenes in the movie, and I guess one could argue that there are some unnatural things going on. But it’s done more on the consciousness level rather than spirits or the dead haunting the living.
The greatest thing in this movie is the crab-walking bone-cracking entity. I immediately was able to call out who played The Backwards Man. There’s an extremely double-jointed “stunt” man in cinema who also played The Jangly man in “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark…” His name is Troy James. The things he can do with his body are NOT natural, but definitely useful in the Horror genre!
I had a lot of fun with this one and I think Mamoudou did a decent job with his first lead role in horror. Emmanuel was successful in Directing/Writing his first full-length movie. Looking forward to seeing what more they put out in the future.
Keep Creepy!
“Black Box”
Released: 2020
Rating: NR
Director: Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour
Writers: Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour, Stephen Herman
IMDB Rating: 6.0 out of 10
Metascore: 61 out of 100
Rotten Tomatoes: 74%
Runtime: 1 hour 40 minutes
Free Streaming as of this Blog: Prime Video
Comments