Black Box (2020)
Directed by Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour, Jr.
After losing his wife and his memory in a car accident, a single father undergoes an experimental treatment that causes him to question who he really is.
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5 films that influenced Black Box
What critics say influenced Black Box
In a lot of ways, Black Box is a marriage between 2017’s Get Out and an episode of Black Mirror .
The visualization of the contraption is reminiscent of the sunken place in Get Out (2017), but Osei-Kuffour’s scenario is comparable to Brandon Cronenberg’s recent Possessor (2020).
It’s more like a solid episode of Black Mirror , with some ideas and imagery pilfered from one of Blumhouse’s biggest hits, Get Out .
All this is prime Blumhouse material with faint parallels to Get Out , and for as long as explanations remain elusive, it's slick and compelling, bolstered by a very capable cast.
Or did they want to see what blending the medical elements in Upgrade and Get Out will bring to the table?
There are odes of J-horror and Get Out in Black Box , and themes that tie to The Lie in some pretty profound ways.
The theme of memory loss draws has similarities to Memento (2000), and how technology is used to enter a person’s mind has parallels with Inception (2010).
“Black Box” tries to mash up “Memento” with “Get Out,” except it leaves aside all the temporal trickery of the former and the cultural commentary that made the latter so indelible.
Much like Memento , Nolan makes for a fascinating but unreliable narrator, often experiencing blackouts and losing track of time.
The theme of memory loss draws has similarities to Memento (2000), and how technology is used to enter a person’s mind has parallels with Inception (2010).
But it's novel to see a journey into the subconscious in which the cool sci-fi elements depict a world only marginally more technologically advanced than our own — unlike the dark mind tampering in such films as The Cell , Dreamscape or even Inception .
From Manchurian Candidate and Jacob’s Ladder to Trance and Inception , the longitudinal cinematic studies in this area have not yielded positive results.
The Black Box sequences feel like Get Out ‘s Sunken Place by way of Inception : Athie is often surrounded in an ink-black void before he trains his brain to create a ‘safe room’ from where he can investigate his memories.
Lensed by Hilda Mercado, the hypnosis sequences conjure anxiety and terror (our initial forays into his memory recalls Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder , 1990), and as scripted by Wade Allain-Marcus (“Insecure”) and Stephen Herman, Black Box is more of a successful drama/thriller hybrid.
From Manchurian Candidate and Jacob’s Ladder to Trance and Inception , the longitudinal cinematic studies in this area have not yielded positive results.
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Did writers Wade Allain-Marcus, Stephen Herman and Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour (who also directs) watch 2014’s Transcendence and think that they could aim where it missed?