Cinematic Concerns

Richard Matheson wrote a short story that was later adapted into Richard Kelly's film The Box. In the film, there is a middle-class husband and wife who find themselves in need of money, who are one day visited by a disfigured man who makes them an unusual offer: he gives them an anonymous-looking box with nothing more but a button on it, and gives them 24 hours to decide whether they want to press the button, at which point they inherit $1 million when they return the box, but someone they don't know will die at the very moment the button is pressed; or they don't press the button, nothing happens, and the man simply collects the box at the deadline. After much deliberation, the wife presses the button. The disfigured man reappears, collects the box, gives them their money and takes off. Just before he leaves, the wife asks him where the box is going to. "Someone else you don't know," he answers.

Well, now that you get a sense of his style, read the following comment about another story that Matheson wrote:

I can't help but wonder what a modern-day filmmaker could do with the Matheson short story "The Distributor." In the story, a guy moves into a neighborhood, commits a lot of strange actions that only increase tensions between people already living there, and then...

He moves.

The question is this. That right there is an effective story, despite its short length, because the punchline is so, well, effective. It couldn't fail to elicit a response from the audience/reader. You will almost certainly feel a certain feeling which is very specific and precise, and difficult for me to articulate accurately; that feeling is not dissimilar (but not identical either) to the ending in Christopher Nolan's Inception. And it works in this written form because of its simplicity. Dot dot dot, "he moves". Genius.

Now, how do you create the same thing on film?

What kind of ending scene would elicit the exact same emotional response in the audience? What do you need to do with editing and cinematography, and music (or no music)? Or do you simply give up by using the excuse "but the written form and the cinematic form are different"?

Hmm. Have a think.