You’ve probably heard the pitch by now. Press the button on the box and two things will happen: first, you’ll receive one million dollars; and second, somewhere someone you don’t know will die. Despite being based on Richard Matheson’s 1970 short story Button, Button, it’s not difficult to see how such a proposal resonates in a time when clicking the mouse to book your penny-pinching Easyjet flight contributes significantly towards, say, the starvation of Ethiopians, as the rising climate continues to scorch their crops. Donnie Darko writer/director Richard Kelly attempts here to flesh out the thin but resonant concept with the kind of twisted sci-fi logic most people had their fill of in 2006’s admirably ambitious Southland Tales. Like Aronofsky’s The Fountain, this is likely to divide audiences into groups of those with a temperament for inventively ridiculous sci-fi with existential pathos, and those without. Still want to push the button?

People live in a box, drive to work in a box, come home and stare into a box.

It’s 1976, and said box arrives on the doorstep of Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur Lewis (James Mardsen) in their suburban Virginia home. She’s a schoolteacher and he’s a NASA scientist in the year the US first landed a spacecraft on Mars. Soon the mysterious and disfigured Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) arrives with the cash-for-corpse proposal, giving them 24 hours to decide. Via some fanciful sci-fi, the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and the revelation of a grand conspiracy, the couple are led to a dilemma with far higher stakes than the one that started it all.

Definitely his most mainstream effort yet, Kelly takes a conceit irresistible to almost everyone and pins the emotional stakes on a near-schmaltzy romance played out by two Hollywood stars. After that, though, it’s business as usual for the uncompromising filmmaker, who once again challenges viewers to put together an intricate plot that’s mechanics are best summed up by the Arthur C. Clarke law quoted in the film: ‘Sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Kelly explains the magic-like box, it’s origin, purpose and role in Steward’s scheme, with the same imaginative sci-fi that explains the action in his previous films. It worked for people in Darko, it didn’t in Southland, and here it’s somewhere between the two. The problem is that the moral dilemma facing the protagonists is dwarfed by the reason for the box’s existence, which is so out there it creates an incredible world not quite relatable to for most people; Darko’s world was out there too, but in that we could credit the on-goings as being inside the head of it’s troubled protagonist, and by the time they were revealed to be real, the groundwork was thoroughly laid and we were completely engrossed.

It’s visually arresting, well acted and has an unsettling retro Arcade Fire score to boot; but your ability to enjoy it predicates primarily on your penchant for sci-fi. Which in many ways is annoying, because the message behind the piece is an important one; Steward at one point lists his reasons for using a box: people live in a box, drive to work in a box, come home and stare into a box. And indeed, it’s this notion of atomisation and alienation that may explain why people are willing to trade strangers’ lives for money in the first place, which is happening all over the world and in many different ways, a fact many of us would like to escape from. It seems fanciful sci-fi isn’t the only thing Kelly is slipping into the mainstream.