A middle-aged sci-fi writer goes to the Mediterranean island of Mallorca to
speak at an conference, and to enjoy a little working vacation with his
long-time partner. While they are there he surprises her with a marriage
proposal. They obviously
have a great relationship, and soon after the proposal are heading off to their bedroom to celebrate their
engagement. While she's getting into her sexy finery, he decides to
walk into the second room of their suite in order to check out a CD that somebody
left in the room for him. It turns out to be creepy. One or two minutes later,
he walks back into the bedroom. His new fiancée has leapt from the balcony to
her death. It is inconceivable that she could have committed suicide under the
known circumstances, but two witnesses saw her jump. The only clue to the
mystery is her cell phone, which she seems to have been holding just before
she jumped, but dropped before she took the plunge.
As he prepares to leave the island in grief, he's accosted at the airport
by another woman who narrowly averted death by suicide. She jumped from her
balcony after receiving a call on her cell phone, but she didn't want to commit
suicide and has no idea why she jumped. As they discuss the circumstances of
both suicide attempts, it seems that the final message received on the cell
phone in both cases was a recording of a Billie Holliday song called
"Gloomy Sunday." The same thing seems to have happened to six other people on
the island as well.
There is one more delicious element to the mystery. When this middle aged
writer was a young man just out of the university, he wrote a sci-fi book
about a future society in which the state plants microchips inside of everyone
at birth. If anyone becomes a unruly dissenter, they are prompted to commit
suicide when their implanted microchip is activated by an external stimulus.
In such a way does the state get rid of dissenters while continuing to appear
benign. The specific stimulus used? I'll bet you've guessed. The suicides
happened right after the jumpers heard the song "Gloomy Sunday."
So how could a fiftyish man be living inside the plot of a book he wrote
some twenty five years earlier, when he freely admits that he basically
cribbed it from other sources (like The Manchurian Candidate) in the first
place? Good question. If you're hooked on that mystery, you'll want to see
this film.
It's a Hitchcockian mystery with a soupcon of sci-fi, and it incorporates, in addition to the elements
described above, some spectacular settings on the Isle of Mallorca and a
classic evil mastermind, James Bond style. The effectiveness of those elements is
amplified by a director who loves Hitchcock, wrote his own script, and was
actually born and raised on that island, and is thus
intimately familiar with all its most exotic charms. He was also fortunate
enough to land Timothy Hutton as his lead, and Hutton seemed absolutely
perfect for the role.
The Kovak Box is just one of those obscure treasures that will absolutely
make your day if it's your kind of movie. The director put a lot of thought
into every element of this film from the opening credits forward, so that
everything ties together. Like any really good sci-fi oriented mystery, it has
something to say about society, but it keeps the social commentary in the
background and lets the mystery take center stage.
It so happens that this is my kind of movie. I'm one of those guys who
would like to bring Rod Serling and Hitchcock back to life, and I couldn't believe that
I was getting such a big kick out of an unheralded film from a Spanish
director I never heard of. I had no idea what this film was about before I
started watching it, and I ended up loving it. I loved the sets, the atmosphere, and the plot. My
only significant quibble is that the film has a very unsatisfying ending. It
just sort of drifts away, and the two main characters move on to separate
lives. The writer is torn between doing what he knows he must do and
reluctance to do it because he also realizes that he's been programmed to do
just that! So he sits on the plane and thinks and ... scribbles a bit in
longhand and ... the credits roll.
Frustrating. I felt like I experienced really passionate foreplay without
an orgasm. While that kind of sex is still great fun, it's even better with a
climax.
