Four Boxes (2009)

i must have seen a different film!!

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The opening credits scream "major indie film." Trevor and Rob sell privacy fences. As a hobby they buy estates and sell the junk on E-Bay. They recently moved into a home owned by Bill Zill who had passed away. The man didn't leave much behind, but left stuff that was coded and cryptic. Rob invites his fiancee to come stay with them, an irritating girl named Amber/Brit who was once engaged to Trevor (guess how that works out). Amber talks like people type on the Internet, with phrases like, BFD and BRB. Likewise her and Trevor like to have conversations with their mouth full of food, another bit of annoying indie realism.It turns out Bill Zill had a love for a web site called "4 Boxes." The 4 boxes are 4 rooms in a house which has cameras. A girl used to run the site, but then left. The house was taken over by a guy who wears a gas mask and is apparently a terrorist making bombs to send to the US. Trevor is trying to figure out who they are, where they are, and if it is real.The movie ends with a twist, then another twist, and then one stupid ending. I think they should have let the movie go with just the first twist instead of attempting to get cute. Sex, brief nudity, f-bomb. If you really really love low budget indies, then try this one out.

I really like the way this movie was made and the story is well written and executed. I won't give away any of the plot, which has some interesting twists and turns. However, the way this story is put together is exactly what indie films are about in my opinion. The movie has a slow start, with a definitive tone, and most of the action is in the last third of the movie, but the setting and character development in the first 40 minutes is the essential part of the film. Rather than being thrust right into the plot, the audience experiences it unfold with the characters. What I dislike about so many indie thrillers is the action tends to unfold in predictable ways along very similar time lines, and while the character development is supposed to be shaped through the action in the film, many times there is not enough care taken in exploring the characters and their relationships. This leaves plots where things seem to just happen to a group of people we don't care about. This film is the opposite, and you find yourself trying to figure out the mystery right alongside the characters.

I was expecting to hate this, especially as it started with low contrast shots, typos on the title cards, etc. I really thought it may be one of those films you watch whilst you're doing something else, so I kept half an eye on it. I really wasn't engaging a lot, doing other stuff, then there was a change of pace (when the film matched the DVD box genre), then another one again (when it went further off-piste). It got my attention.6*'s - we're in the 4-5's for the first hour or so, but we get to a 7, maybe 7.5 for some inventive thinking and the meta-ness of the film. The first hour is fine to half-watch if you've got other stuff on too.

Four Boxes requires a lot of patience, but it's well worth the investment of your time. A little less than an hour into this film, I was sitting here asking myself - not for the first time - why I was watching such a boring and pointless movie. Then, all of a sudden, everything changed, and Four Boxes reached right out and grabbed me. In just a few shocking seconds of revelation, the filmmakers press all of the buttons for suspense and horror. It's instant brilliance, in my opinion. Then, having cinematically punched you in the face, the filmmakers follow that up with another surprising slap across the chops that completely re-frames what you just saw. Then, determined not to fall back on any conventionality, these guys deliver a decidedly weird and unexpected ending. There's more originality and daring filmmaking in this low budget, independent film's final twenty-five minutes than you could possibly scrape up across all of Hollywood.The first two thirds of this movie seems like an exercise in futility about three characters living lives of quiet desperation. Trevor Grainger (Justin Kirk) and Rob Rankus (Sam Rosen) are two exceedingly average guys who supplement their incomes by acquiring the possessions of dead loners and selling them on EBAY. As they temporarily move in to clean out the house of the late Bill Zill, they're joined by Amber Croft (Terryn Westbrook), a girl who used to date Trevor but is now engaged to Rob. Apart from some love triangle friction, there isn't much going on here at all. Zill was apparently a pretty weird dude, though, who seemingly left behind some cryptic clues about something. For the most part, though, our characters spend a lot of time watching this little web site Rob discovered called Four Boxes. As he explains it, the site began with a woman broadcasting live video feeds from four different rooms in her home; then she moved out, leaving the cameras in place. The new tenant, a seriously weird dude the friends nickname "Havoc," apparently has no idea that his personal life is being broadcast all over the Internet. He sleeps in a bat-cage, frequently dons a gas mask, and seems to be making more than a few bombs. The question our characters face is whether or not what they are seeing is actually real and, if so, what - if anything - they should do about it. All of that just serves to set up the real meat of the story, though - and I'm not going to give anything away as far as that is concerned.Some people are going to give up on this movie before it delivers its impressive payload. The characters are rather pathetic, uninteresting, and downright depressing, making it hard to care what might happen to any of them. You may think you're watching the worst movie ever made, but I'm telling you to hang in there. When the you-know-what hits the fan, you're going to want to be there. Four Boxes - made for a mere forty thousand dollars, is billed as "part thriller, part dark comedy, part social satire" - and, in the end, it is all of that and more.