The Box

Really slow, weird and strangely watchable. This should've been a boring movie but it wasn't.

Hako is a curious little film. Nakajima would appear to possess an artistic temperament without the storytellers commitment to structure and flow, so it's difficult to make out at the macro level, but full of striking details.

Shares elements with the filmmaker's debut, featuring a mysterious old man/creator, a child/children, abstracted scenes serving apparently metaphorical ends, careful construction of images, a meditative rhythm and so on. But this viewer was only able to grasp hints of meaning (to do with the relationship between nature and technology, no doubt, but hardly more specific than that), and the images did not feel quite so evocative as seemingly intended. Others may find more significance in the work.