I love Timothy Hutton, and I’m not really sure why I’d never watched The Kovak Box. When it popped up on Plex, I figured I’d take a chance.
The premise certainly sounded good enough. Hutton plays David Norton, a successful science-fiction writer invited to an island to give a lecture. He arrives with his girlfriend, Jane (Georgia Mackenzie), only to discover that somebody has apparently lured him there for reasons that become increasingly strange.
Thriller. Mystery. Science fiction. Timothy Hutton. I can dig it.
And for a while, I did.
Then The Kovak Box became the cinematic equivalent of somebody handing me a Rubik’s Cube with half the stickers missing.
Welcome to the Weird
David is already a little unreliable when we meet him. He’s writing on his laptop during a flight and imagining bizarre things happening around him, so the movie immediately plants the possibility that we shouldn’t necessarily believe everything we’re seeing.
Fine.
David gives his author talk, proposes to Jane and returns to his hotel room, where somebody has left him a mysterious DVD. He watches it, and it’s footage of a monkey in a laboratory bashing itself to death inside a glass cage.
Well. Now you have my attention.
Then Jane disappears. David hears screams, finds the balcony door open and eventually learns that the woman he was planning to marry is dead (or close enough that she isn’t going to recover) from an apparent suicide.
Meanwhile, we’re following another woman named Silvia (Lucía Jiménez), and for quite a while I had absolutely no idea why.
This is where The Kovak Box establishes the pattern it will follow for most of the movie: Give me something intriguing. Confuse the hell out of me. Start dragging. Give me something intriguing again just before I completely lose interest.
Repeat.
Gloomy Sunday Is Having a Very Bad Day
Silvia’s story eventually provides one of the movie’s better sequences. Her phone rings and plays “Gloomy Sunday.” Something comes over her and she suddenly plunges from a building.
Except she survives.
Things get even stranger when she ends up at the hospital and David is there dealing with Jane’s dire situation. For a while, the way the movie cuts between them makes it look like David and Silvia have some mysterious connection.
Do they know each other? Is she his mistress? Is somebody hallucinating? Are we jumping around in time?
Eventually the pieces start connecting. The same song is involved. David’s first novel was also called Gloomy Sunday. People are dying. Somebody is watching Silvia. There’s a mysterious man attacking people and removing something from their bodies. And apparently we’re dealing with a conspiracy involving some form of mind control.
This should be exactly the point where the movie takes off. Instead, I kept waiting for somebody to explain what the f*ck was happening.
Glad to Meet Ya, Grandpa Joe, Evil Genius
Eventually David meets Frank Kovak, played by David Kelly. Yes, Grandpa Joe from the 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Which, if you think about it, somehow makes sense. Not that the two movies have anything to do with each other, but that Johnny Depp Wonka was weird as hell. The 1971 Gene Wilder version was weird too, but the Depp version was like Captain Jack Sparrow on acid.
Anyway, this Grandpa Joe has apparently gotten out of bed, abandoned the chocolate factory and started experimenting on human brains.
Kovak is connected to some kind of technology capable of manipulating people’s behavior. The victims have been implanted with devices, “Gloomy Sunday” is part of the mechanism, and the suicides are not suicides at all.
Kovak also has a particular interest in David.
Why?
He wants him to write a book.
And that’s where I started thinking: The only way to escape this fucking movie is to write the damn book.
Because the more information The Kovak Box gave me, the less certain I became about what I was watching. Is David experiencing reality? Is he imagining some of it? Is this becoming the book he’s writing? Is Kovak staging everything? Why were all these particular people selected? What exactly is Kovak trying to accomplish? Why does David have to be involved?
There are answers buried in here somewhere, but the movie makes getting to them feel like punishment.
Every Time I Wanted Out, Something Happened
The frustrating part is that The Kovak Box isn’t boring all the way through. It has some genuinely intense sequences.
Silvia is attacked in her home and temporarily paralyzed while remaining conscious. That’s creepy as hell, and it immediately reminded me of “The Stewmaker,” one of The Blacklist‘s best episodes. There’s something particularly horrifying about being completely aware of what’s happening to you while being unable to move or do a damn thing to stop it.
Later, Silvia is in a cab when “Gloomy Sunday” starts playing and suddenly begins smashing her head against the partition. That’s effective too.
And the movie’s big sequence inside the caves is probably its best stretch. By then David has discovered that people from his flight appear to be connected to the experiment. A group of tourists begins succumbing to whatever Kovak has done to them. People start killing themselves. Bodies end up in the water. Silvia is desperately trying to save people while David races through the caves looking for the source of the signal.
For a few minutes, The Kovak Box becomes the movie I kept hoping it would be.
Then it goes back to explaining itself badly.
That’s the problem. The intense moments are surrounded by so much plodding confusion that they can’t save the movie.
Twenty Minutes Left. Please Send Help.
At some point I looked at the clock and realized I had about twenty minutes left. My actual thought was: Do I have to watch the whole thing?
That’s usually not a great sign.
If this had landed in Streaming Roulette, I might have tapped out. But I’d come this far, and I wanted to know whether The Kovak Box could finally pull everything together.
Instead, the final stretch gave me more Kovak, more mind control, more talk about what might happen if this technology gets loose and more uncertainty about exactly what David is experiencing. Kovak apparently believes the technology will eventually be used on the masses. He wants David to expose the truth through a book.
Or something.
At this point my notes literally say: “WTF is this movie.”
That’s not me being cute after the fact. That’s where The Kovak Box left me while I was watching it.
Maybe this movie had already instilled some kind of mind control on me to keep me watching. Some subliminal message whispering: This is a great movie. Don’t touch the remote. You need to see how it ends.
Whatever. Apparently it worked.
A Puzzle Isn’t Automatically Smart
I like movies that make me think. I don’t need everything explained to me, and I don’t need a neat little bow around every mystery. Hell, sometimes ambiguity is exactly what makes a movie worth thinking about afterward.
But there’s a difference between intriguing ambiguity and storytelling that makes me wonder whether I missed twenty minutes while sitting directly in front of the television.
The Kovak Box kept throwing ideas at me without making me care enough about the answers. Mind control. Suicide. Implants. Government experiments. A dying mad genius. A science-fiction writer being forced into the middle of his own conspiracy story.
There is a good movie somewhere inside that box.
I couldn’t find it.
Even the ending circles back toward earlier events, with Silvia alive and David once again on a plane with his laptop, apparently writing about what happened. Maybe that’s supposed to make everything click into place.
For me, it produced one final:
Wait. What?
I wanted to like The Kovak Box. I really did. Timothy Hutton got me through more of it than I probably would have tolerated otherwise. But scattered bursts of intensity can’t compensate for a movie that spends most of its runtime making you work this hard for so little payoff.
🗑️ Our Verdict: TRASH. If you’re looking for a brain freeze and a headache, climb inside The Kovak Box. Otherwise, leave the damn thing closed.
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