By Payton McCarty-Simas
Starring Geoffrey Cantor, Sean Mahon and Ian Lithgow
Written and directed by Patrick Biesemans
Quiver Distribution
CREEP BOX, Patrick Biesemans’ uber-meditative debut feature is clearly ambitious, if only intellectually. Unobtrusively set in the near future of 2029, the film plumbs growing fears around AI with a topical premise: Scientists at a blandly corporate start-up called HTDA have found a way to “simulate” the consciousnesses of the recently deceased – for those who can afford the privilege – and allow mourners the chance to say goodbye to their loved ones by communing with a dull grey box that’s visually one part Hellraiser to one part 2001: A Space Odyssey. HDTA’s lead scientist (Daredevil’s Geoffrey Cantor), known by his last name, Caul (yes, as in The Conversation), fears the greedy capitalists in charge aren’t spending enough time on research, instead throwing themselves at a DOJ contract that would put these little-understood AI shrouds to work testifying at their own murder trials. As the anniversary of his wife’s death draws near, Caul goes vigilante, bringing one of the boxes home with him for “personal research,” hoping to understand whether these “whispering” undead voices represent a forensic breakthrough or more tantalizingly, a peek beyond the veil. Alas, CREEP BOX fails to live up to either its ambitiously intellectual premise, drifting its way slowly into the realm of stale moral platitudes, or any of the numerous points of dramatic potential therein. Eventually, it adopts a drowsy rhythm that lacks excitement or even interest as a thought exercise.
While Biesemans takes pleasure in crafting the goofy, pseudoscientific mechanics of the box at the film’s center, it’s difficult to share his enjoyment. As Caul explains to one of HDTA’s clients, the simulated consciousness manifested through the box is made up of the deceased loved one’s “ego, superego, and id.” What this means, practically speaking, is that the scientists have found a way to download memories from corpses during autopsies, using a handful of sci-fi tools that are never explained (beyond offhand medical drama jargon about “Wernicke’s area” and the “cortex”). This uncanny uploading and downloading of the mind, vaguely reminiscent of the mechanics of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, is a fun and compelling premise. But the fact that the filmmakers pause what little action there is to discuss Freud’s theories as though these three mental constructs were literal parts of the brain (they’re not) speaks to CREEP BOX’s halfhearted approach to its “deep” material: The film is both underdeveloped and over-explained, eager to share its thoughts on consciousness and yet barely interested in demonstrating them, dryly wandering through its tangled web of philosophy and (pseudo)science with little regard for narrative or cinematic language.
CREEP BOX isn’t really a horror movie, and to call it a psychological thriller would be too generous. Rather, the film is a series of Socratic discussions with influences that range from psychoanalysis to Japanese Zen Buddhism (Caul references Kōan with one of his simulations as a sort of sentience test) to H.P. Lovecraft to New Hollywood heroes like Coppola and Kubrick. The plodding rhythms of its protagonist’s days are mundane, familiar and intentionally depressing: He goes to his office where his superior throws his earnest interest in their research to the wolves of capital and surveillance culture; He lamely harasses former clients asking personal questions about the deceased; He goes home, where he gets wine drunk and chats with one of the simulations whose consciousness-USB he bought off of an amoral lackey; His daughter calls to see how he’s handling his wife’s death, and he ignores her; Repeat.
At one point, Caul’s most promising simulation, Adam (Adam David Thompson), calls him a “very dour person.” Yet, while his depression is one of the film’s central points, as it investigates the confusion and existential emptiness precipitated by dramatic loss, Caul’s uniform melancholy is also one of the film’s greatest weaknesses. Adding to this, CREEP BOX is also (with all respect to a low budget) painfully underlit, adding to the woebegone vibe as lonely characters drift from sparsely decorated, shallow-focused offices to sparsely decorated, shallow-focused homes and back again. (In this movie, the well-dressed wives of dead men seem to be forever at home, standing by the door, waiting for HDTA men to arrive so they can cry a single tear and say that nothing will bring their hubbies back. Don’t they need to go to work? Get groceries?) This mix of melancholy characters and maudlin cinematography slowly weigh everything down to the point where CREEP BOX devolves from the realm of the forgivably “atmospheric” and “contemplative” to that of the anti-depressant commercial. To make matters worse, when Caul finally starts to crack up in earnest, his blood pressure never really seems to rise, unlike his namesake in Coppola’s own classic psychodrama. While much of this seems to be an issue of direction, the script also plateaus far too soon, failing to deliver any real mystery and defaulting instead into a series of predictable reveals. The filmmaker is obviously earnestly interested in exploring the religious and philosophical questions his protagonist so desperately wants answered, but without a strong story to back up the more abstractly philosophical investigation at hand (think David Prior’s magnetic debut The Empty Man or Cronenberg’s latest, The Shrouds), the material remains hazy, a murmuring simulation of a thriller. Unfortunately for everyone, and despite Biesemans’ best efforts, the script never really comes to life.
