Director/Screenplay – Kevin Khachan, Producers – Kevin Khachan & Jason Von Drayco, Photography – Jason Von Drayco. Production Company – Studio Magnetica/Diym Production.
Kasia Stelmach (Prisoner 371113), Lorry D’Ercole (Passer-By), Jasmine Evans (Eyes), Martin Cohen (Apple), Alicia Cantero (Monitor), Charlotte Coquelin (Prisoner 70123), Tessa Neilson (Prisoner 13558), Alex Yazbeck (Prisoner 180102)
Australia, 2053. To deal with a high crime rate and prison overcrowding, the government has created the Box Program where prisoners face the choice either of instant execution or spending their sentence confined to a box isolated in the countryside. Food and supplies are only sent at the discretion of those who choose to come and visit. One woman struggles to deal with a sentence of seven years while locked in a container only a few feet wide.
Box: Metaphor was the third film for director Kevin Khachan who had previously made the horror film Red Rabbit Lodge (2019) and the SF film True Love Inc (2023), which appears to be currently unreleased, and subsequently the horror film It Becomes Her (2024).
Box: Metaphor sets up the idea of a future Prison and a severe set of social circumstances, while the very title creates the idea that the box is a metaphor or allegory of something, the implication being that we will find out throughout the course of the film. When I initially came across the film, I was hoping for something that would be a fascinating intellectual puzzle like Cube (1997) or maybe even the biting allegory of the other great Australian future prison film Dead-End Drive-In (1986); I ended up severely disappointed.
In actuality, what we get is a film that spends almost all of 87-minute running time inside what look like shipping containers that have been converted into prison sets. There is no real plot to anything that happens – just scenes of Kasia Stelmach and others sweating, starving and suffering in the boxes and their occasional interactions with others. Moreover, all of these scenes are shot in darkness with only narrow bands of light coming through and/or closeups – the cells have barely enough room for the prisoners to walk around in. Mostly the film focuses on Kasia Stelmach, but other prisoners are also depicted, although we are never told what crimes any of them have been convicted for.
The upshot of this makes Box: Metaphor feel like a glorified short film that has been extruded beyond its natural length. The most plot we get is the scenes where a man (Martin Cohen) comes to taunt Kasia while eating an apple and she pleads for him to feed her – “But do you need the taste of an apple?” – the price of which is having sex with him, only for her to then become pregnant. For that matter, we never even find out what the metaphor of the title is meant to be. For a film to so blatantly advertise itself as such a work, it almost begs the question but I reached the end of the film baffled about what it had to say.
Trailer here