The Box
2017 · 10m · Ireland
Directed by Adam Collins
Genres: dark comedy, horror, thriller
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
Driving down a dark country road, Niall picks up a strange hitchhiker cradling a mysterious cardboard box — and becomes consumed by the need to know what's inside.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A hitchhiker with a box shouldn't work—it's the most obvious setup for disaster—but Collins leans so hard into the absurdist dread and tonal whiplash that it becomes genuinely disorienting; the film treats the box like a Chekhov's gun that refuses to fire, and that refusal is the whole point.
Collins executes a formally restrained thriller that echoes the tight-space tension of Hitchcock while nodding toward contemporary absurdist horror; the economy of the piece—a single car, mounting claustrophobia, restraint in what we're shown—demonstrates real control over genre convention.
The film's smartest move is how it lets the *sound* of the box—or the silence around it—become more present than any visual reveal; that decision to keep the mystery as pure psychological pressure rather than spectacle is what separates this from every other curiosity-box premise.