The Kovak Box

Introduction

David Norton (Timothy Hutton) is a best selling science fiction author who has been invited to the island of Mallorca to discuss his works. Accompanying him is girlfriend Jane (Georgia MacKenzie), to whom Norton proposes. Then it all starts to go a bit pear shaped. Jane gets a call on her mobile playing the song Gloomy Sunday which compels her to jump off her hotel balcony whilst Norton is distracted by a DVD-ROM of a monkey in a cage.

Elsewhere on the island is Silvia Mendez (Lucía Jiménez) who seems to be trying to escape from a mad ex-boyfriend. After meeting and going off with the resident DJ at a local club, Mendez also gets a Gloomy Sunday call and hurls herself of her balcony, saved only by the canopy in the café below.

Due to a bizarre coincidence Silvia first ends up in the hospital bed next to Jane and then teams up with him after an escapade and another suicide at the airport. It turns out that there have been a rash of suicides on Mallorca recently, and a meeting with disgraced scientist Frank Kovak (David Kelly) starts to shed some light on what's been happening.


Events are very much being manipulated by Kovak, whose most well known scientific work was about the manipulation of rat behaviour with said creature in a maze (called, oddly enough, the Kovak box). Can Norton work out what Kovak wants and can he save Silvia from topping herself involuntarily again?

Visual

Picture's fine and includes some quite fantastic scenery via long and helicopter shots of the island of Mallorca. The only thing spoiling it is the DNC Entertainment banner across the bottom of the screen, but that isn't captured in the screen shots, but believe me it was there and constant - very annoying.

Audio

No subtitles, which was annoying as some of the dialogue was a bit low in the mix. The music by Roque Baños is suitably thrilleristic (or something) but sometimes a little too loud in comparison to the dialogue. This could just be a check disc issue though.

Extras

Nada.

Overall

Not a bad little thriller, although not as sci-fi as billed in my view. It's an interesting concept but is a little too stretched in the influence of main protagonist Kovak, could he really have engineered events in quite the way portrayed? Obviously there has to be some stretch of imagination and suspension of disbelief, but it crosses the line a little in the believability stakes - especially the climax of the film.


Still, it's a diverting enough hour and a half. Hutton is fine but not great and Lucía Jiménez works well with what she's given, turning in a rather sullen and moody performance as you might expect from someone who is aware she could be forced to end her life against her will. The gorgeous Georgia MacKenzie is not in this film anywhere near enough and although it goes with the plot, her death is rather wasted. Frank Kelly is also not in the film enough, but he uses his screen time wisely, with a good solid performance as the bad and mad scientist manipulating everything to his own end. There's a deliberate air of menace whenever he appears on screen, which was a little bizarre when I think back to the past performances I've seen.

The Kovak Box is a diverting enough piece of fluff, not brilliant but worth the watch at least once.