Features > Movie Reviews > Buried…

The movies have explored the nightmare every so often, most memorably in The Vanishing, Roger Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe film The Premature Burial, and also in Kill Bill Vol 2, but so far as I know this is the first film to stick within the confines of the coffin for its entire running time.

Thankfully, Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) has a mobile phone, and (remarkably) a signal. But it’s not like he has much else to be thankful for.

A truck driver who has taken the bait of a big payday to work for a contractor in Iraq, he comes to in the dark, stuck in a pine box only a couple of inches bigger than his body. The last thing he remembers, an ambush that left most if not all of his colleagues dead. Why he has been spared he doesn’t know – if he has been spared.

He has a lighter (which is nice for us). And he finds the phone. It seems whoever put him here isn’t overly concerned if he wants to call 911 (they’re not helpful), his wife (answerphone), his employers (they put him through to personnel – another answerphone) or even the FBI. There’s not much he can tell: he’s buried alive, somewhere in Iraq.

Eventually he realizes that the only people who can help him are the folks who put him here in the first place.

Written by Chris Sparling and directed by Rodrigo Cortes (it’s a Spanish coproduction), Buried never pretends there is an easy way out. Surprisingly political, it makes much of Paul’s belated understanding that the institutions he thought would save him are more concerned that he doesn’t do anything that would embarrass them – like contact the media, or make the video that his captors demand. Schlock effects – like the inevitable incursion of stray wildlife – are kept to a minimum.

Cortes doesn’t have a lot of wiggle room, but he raises the roof occasionally, to peer down on Paul from a worm’s eye view, and he finds more variety by introducing several different sources of light, each with a different colour filter. The first minute of the movie is a pure black screen, and all we hear is Paul’s laboured breathing. It’s a bold opening gambit, and a hint that Cortes understands the trick here is to find the rhythm of the drama. Paul’s panic ebbs and flows, as fear and frustration (imagine getting call waiting music at a time like this) mingle with exhaustion and dogged attempts to preserve oxygen, energy, and – most important – battery life.

I guess it goes without saying this is intense and claustrophobic. Fair to say it this represents quite a change of pace for Ryan Reynolds, an actor most of us probably saw last trading quips with Sandra Bullock in The Proposal or cosying up to his Mrs, Scarlett Johansson, in front of the paps. He’s certainly up to this down-to-earth challenge – and presumably planning on cremation when the time comes.