Review: Buried

Ryan Reynolds plays an American truck driver in Iraq working for a private contractor. He has awoken to find himself buried alive inside a coffin! Apparently, his unit was ambushed by insurgents and Reynolds was taken prisoner. He has a pen, a lighter, and mobile phone (with a weak signal and not much battery left) with him, the latter of which he uses to call his elderly mother, as well as the Feds to try and get someone to find him. He also gets a call from the terrorist who kidnapped him who is demanding he ask the US government for a ransom of five million dollars, and they also want him to make a video with his phone. Although the action never leaves the coffin, we hear various voices on Reynolds’ phone including 911, the Pentagon (both of whom put him on hold at the worst frigging possible time), the State Department (including Bill Paterson as a well-meaning but not very useful representative of the Hostage Working Group), his wife back home (Samantha Mathis), his cruelly unsympathetic employer (perennial nerdy a-hole Stephen Tobolowsky), and even his dementia-afflicted mother. Can Reynolds be rescued before his oxygen runs out?

This uncomfortable but remarkable 2010 film from director Rodrigo Cortes (mostly a short film director before this) and writer Chris Sparling (his debut script) gets a lot of comparisons to some of Hitchcock’s more experimental films like “Lifeboat” and “Rope”, I simply refer to it as a terrific high-concept thriller and one of the top five films of the year. From it’s interesting title design and thunderous (and judiciously used) music score by Victor Reyes, to the excellent sound design (especially), and cinematography by Eduard Grau (who remarkably never repeats a single shot), this is an extremely well-made, effective little film. It grabs you right from moment one because you want to know what is going on and how it’ll turn out. In some ways you could see this working as an episode or two of “24”, but it works remarkably well as a feature film, far more than just a good idea stretched beyond its means.

The central performance from Ryan Reynolds (who has come a long way from ripping off Jim Carrey on that stupid pizza show he was on) is his best-ever work. It’s a tricky role, but he gives it everything he’s got (the usually cocky, glib actor has never been more vulnerable), given he hasn’t got a whole helluva lot to work with under the circumstances. I’m not so sure I’d be calling my Dementia-suffering mother, though, when battery power let alone oxygen needs to be conserved. I understood why, but I dunno, I’d be saving strength and mobile phone juice myself. Maybe that makes me an arsehole, I dunno. All credit to the voice actors too, because they even moreso than Reynolds are working under constrained circumstances. Jose Luis Garcia Perez in particular is creepy as hell, and Stephen Tobolowsky is his usual schmuck self in perfect casting.

I do have a couple of minor qualms about the film, however. Firstly, as well-shot as the film is (even the use of filters didn’t bother me), some of those overhead shots, whilst attractive are showing that either the coffin has no top (and it’s meant to have one, obviously), or that it’s bigger than any coffin in existence. Either that or coffins are a whole lot bigger than I’ve always imagined (I couldn’t personally work out exactly how it was done, which is a point in its favour, however). Secondly, the bad guy in this goes to some awfully complicated and frankly counter-productive means to get what he wants. I was never quite sold on that I must admit, but I also didn’t think about it most of the time because I was too damn tense. Those are minor complaints in an otherwise extremely effective film that thanks to Sparling and Cortes is gripping from start to finish.

It’s extremely tense (almost unbearably so towards the end), especially an encounter with a snake (which also had me wondering how big the coffin was, but effective is effective, and I was biting my nails). The ending in particular is extremely distressing, and stayed with me for a long time afterwards. Some might call it a political stunt, but I was too traumatised to even think like that.

This film really deserves to be seen, unless you’re majorly claustrophobic. It’s a damn good minimalist thriller.

Rating: B