2010 saw a rash of movies tapping the primal vein of terror that is claustrophobia, with filmmakers seemingly engaged in a feverish frenzy of ingenious sadism with a mind to imprison their protagonist everywhere from an elevator (Devil), to a tank (Lebanon), to the wrong side of a most inconveniently placed boulder (127 Hours). Yet none of them were quite prepared to so wholly commit to the peril as Rodrigo Cortes' sophomore feature, Buried. A stripped down exercise in taut, tidy storytelling, Cortes nasty little shocker boldly opens within the stifling confines of it's eerily plausible locale, and never for one single, solitary second moves beyond it.
As we quickly become aware, we're buried inside a coffin. More precisely, Ryan Reynold's blue collar truck driver, Paul Conroy, is. But make no mistake, Cortes suffocating direction along with Reynold's raw, committed, performance will have you squirming in the dark as if you too were in there pressed up against him. Home theater viewing is uncomfortable enough, and one imagines that the imposing loom of a cinema screen would have been almost unbearable.
With only the faint flicker of a zippo lighter, and the tick-tock, tick-tock dwindling of a Blackberry gradually draining of power, events unfold in real time and we are able to piece together the events surrounding Paul's terrible predicament. He's a truck driver for a private contractor in Iraq. His convoy was ambushed. He blacked out. He awoke to find himself trapped in a coffin seemingly buried somewhere in the endless desert. With the Blackberry the only portal to the outside world we watch helplessly as Paul desperately tries to reach someone who can help him before his air runs out, encountering a barrage of belligerent operators, embittered in-laws, smug-activists along the way. From time to time his apparent captors even call to check-in, demanding a ridiculously unrealistic ransom for his release.
Beautifully paced, scripter Chris Sparling's tidy screenplay runs a nice line in subtext, drawing a neat parallel with ongoing geo-political events, offering a gallery of indifferent voices, each with their own agenda, all so horribly disconnected from events on the ground that it's almost laughable. "We need to keep this situation contained," blithers his company's head of HR. "I think I'm contained enough already!" Paul sarcastically barks back. Every bit as effective as the increasingly more sardonic back-and-forth over the phone is Cortes clever use us silence and the dark, with the director quite prepared to have us sit and listen to the sound of breathing. After all, what else is there to do after you've exhausted yourself thrashing and wailing in your oxygen thin tomb?
It isn't entirely with it's flaws. A contrived encounter with a serpent is a notable mistep, and the political parable is undermined by Paul's Iraqi captors seemingly driven by nothing more than good old fashioned greed. Most of all you'll be left questioning why Ryan Reynold's has seemingly chosen to spend so much of his career coasting on roles that require little more than him strutting around as an insufferable gobshite when he clearly has so much more to offer? But that's a matter for another day. What is here is an unflinchingly visceral portrait of darkest terror. And you'll be craning to kiss the sky before it's over.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Special features include a decent, if brief, making-of featurette (7 coffins, a 17-day shoot, 30-35 shots a day. no wonder Reynold's seems so believable). Also included in the theatrical trailer, along with your DVD and digital copies.
"Buried" is on sale January 24, 2011 and is rated R. Thriller. Directed by Rodrigo Cortes. Written by Chris Sparling. Starring Ryan Reynolds.
