| The Kovak Box | |
| Producer: | Álvaro Augustín |
| Director: | Daniel Monzón |
| Starring: | Timothy Hutton Lucía Jiménez Annette Badland David Kelly |
| Music: | Roque Baños |
| Cinematography: | Carles Gusi |
| Editing: | Simon Cozens |
| Distributor: | First Look Studios |
| Runtime: | 102 minutes |
| Country: | Spain United Kingdom |
| Language: | English |
The Kovak Box is a 2006 psychological thriller film directed by Daniel Monzón and starring Timothy Hutton, Lucía Jiménez, Annette Badland and David Kelly. The film concerns an American horror/science fiction novelist who finds the plot of one of his stories unfold around him after a conference in Spain.
On the island city of Palma de Mallorca, David Norton (Hutton) promotes his latest book, The Kovak Box before a small private gathering of European fans. While nothing unusual happens, one of the audience members has a distinctive Russian Mafia arm tattoo, and the hotel concierges are subtly condescending towards Norton, despite the writer's mannered patronage and celebrity status.
Later in the evening, Norton's fiancee, Jane, receives an anonymous phone call and jumps off their hotel balcony. After Jane dies from her injuries in the hospital, Norton discovers a nearby patient, Silvia Mendez (Jiménez), did the same thing on the same night: While taking a shower, Silvia answered a call consisting only of the 1933 song Gloomy Sunday by composer Rezső Seress. After jumping from her window, she only remembers waking up nude under a crushed bar canopy. Silvia is a young nightclub debutante with no enemies or connections to the American couple. While Silvia recuperates in her apartment, a mysterious man attempts to stab her in the back of the neck but flees after their struggle. After the attack, Silvia reunites with Norton, who is also being pursued by unknown assailants.
Norton finds that the events coincide with the plot of his latest book, which is based on a real individual: Frank Kovak (Kelly), a Hungarian doctor who was disgraced and driven to exile after his experiments were passed off as psychological warfare. Kovak used neural implants and paid a network of criminals to reproduce the experiment—in which everyone takes their life (or suffers a brutal death) while the Gloomy Sunday song plays—on Norton. Ailing from a terminal brain tumor, Kovak has nothing to lose except Norton winning his deadly game.