This is neither my first nor last post concerning Sasha Sibley, the aspiring filmmaker from Los Angeles, scarcely older than myself, whom I recently had the pleasure of interviewing after being fortunate enough to watch his second feature film, The Painted (2024), at a local cinema. Right after getting home from said cinema, I’d discovered Sasha’s first feature film: The Box.

In his response to my initial email, Sasha had, matter-of-factly, described it as “ULB” (stands, obviously, for ultra-low-budget) and that he’d made it while he was still in college. Naturally, that had made me all the more excited to watch it. I had already seen the trailer and loved it. It was intriguing, sufficiently cryptic, and deceptive, conveying just the right amount of information and leaving the viewer wanting more. It was well-edited and had aroused my curiosity. No complaints there.

The movie lived up to the expectations. It employed some interesting storytelling devices. It started off with a junior actor, Tyler, at an audition that you almost immediately begin to care for. Interestingly, there’s also a narrator whose purpose or identity is never directly revealed. There’s parallel narratives. You follow the actor through some ups and downs, but mainly downs, leading up to his first big break. You sympathize with his loneliness, and you feel his frustration as he struggles to pay rent. You watch him giving it his all and you root for him.

You also watch him constantly have this recurring white torture dream that’s not only clearly symbolic of the high life awaiting him in his ideal future but also quite literally the script of the movie he’s trying to get cast in. This connection was left mostly unexplained. My best guess is that it just represented that like most actors who make it big, Tyler finally found a script that read like it was literally written for him and him alone. Later on, this idea is solidified, when the director of the movie turns out to be a guy he met in one iteration of his recurring dream and they both have a moment, over the phone, where they feel as if they’ve met each other before and the director exclaims that Tyler isn’t just a perfect candidate for the movie but the only guy he wants to make the movie with.

We also see an older, bearded, version of him talking to a therapist about the dream. This narrative seems mostly unnecessary and didn’t appear much except for at the very start of the movie and the very end. I think the only purpose it really served was to show us that Tyler eventually makes it big. I think by the end we see Tyler embracing his “white torture” lifestyle and maybe the purpose of the therapist sequence is just to show us that his struggles didn’t immediately end when he got his big break. They just shifted from being financial in nature to psychological.

The ending was a little underwhelming, but it was also perfect. I don’t think I wanted it any other way. Nothing ridiculous or unexpected happens, no big reveal. In the same mellow tone that the movie maintained throughout, we realize that Tyler finally got what he wanted and we’re happy for him. It’s implied that he’s famous but possibly only moderately. It’s clear that he has fans and following but he may not necessarily be a sensation.

What I loved about the movie was how perfectly paced it was. It wasn’t shot in real-time, yet it brilliantly captured the slow, deliberate hand of time—the way life unfolds gradually, almost imperceptibly, until you suddenly realize how far you’ve come. The things that were left unexplained suddenly didn’t even matter to me anymore, almost as if it was symbolic of how life doesn’t always give you clear answers, yet you move forward anyway.

It’s not often that you traverse backward through a filmmaker’s career and find yourself even more impressed, but Sasha Sibley has managed to achieve that. This is in no way a jab at his recent and equally brilliant production, but rather a testament to the strength of his earlier work. His past films don’t feel like mere stepping stones toward mastery—they already showcase a level of skill, storytelling, and vision that many directors spend years trying to refine. Watching his trajectory, it’s clear that his evolution isn’t about reinvention, but about sharpening what was already exceptional. His consistency as a filmmaker is just as impressive as his growth.