The director Richard Kelly's latest film starts off with an intriguing premise: a mysterious man with half his face missing (Frank Langella) offers Norma (Cameron Diaz) and her husband $1m to push a button on a box: the only catch is that a stranger will die if they do it. But what could have been a neat thriller soon spirals out of control, and we have a convoluted plot involving aliens, conspiracies and the failure of human morality that is hard to follow and makes little sense. Kelly, who made Donnie Darko, brings the 1970s to life, but not his characters. The acting is stiff, the special effects look cheap and the dialogue is unintentionally funny.
12A, 115 mins