BURIED

There’s a scene in Kill Bill 2 where ‘The Bride’ is buried alive. It's tense, exciting and visually appealing and yet the possibility that such a sequence could be stretched to feature-film length never hit me. This brings us to Buried, a film with a neat, if not entirely unprecedented premise. Yet, I’m not sure if this kind of thing has ever been done in such a visceral, unrelenting and uncomfortable fashion. Cinema at its best should transport us away from our own life - be it to a more wonderful world, or, as in the case of Buried to a brutal, nightmarish reality. Indeed watching Buried in the darkness of the cinema as I writhed about uncomfortably in my chair, I had the unsettling sensation that the walls were closing in on me and the air was becoming steadily thicker. Don’t be surprised if when you leave your seat at the end of the movie you find yourself praising some higher power for simply having the ability to get up and leave. Buried is the kind of film that grips you right from the start and doesn’t let go until like its protagonist, you have been shed of all hope.

Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) an American contractor working as a truck-driver in Iraq awakens in complete darkness. Like Paul, we see nothing and can hear only the sound of his increasingly frantic breath as he scrabbles around in the darkness realising the full horror of his situation. He is buried some distance under the ground (though not so deep that he has no phone signal) in a wooden coffin with only a lighter, a torch that doesn’t work particularly well, a couple of glow sticks, a knife, a flask of alcohol and most importantly – a mobile phone. Unlike The Bride, Paul cannot focus all his energy into a punch and break his way out of the coffin. If you haven’t seen the trailer or heard anything about this film beforehand, all you need to know is that Buried is 94 minutes long and that all 94 minutes occur inside the coffin. There need be no further plot analysis – indeed to find out any more may impair your enjoyment of the film.

Buried, like any film of its ilk owes a debt of gratitude towards Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in which Jimmy Stewart’s broken leg keeps him confined to the rear room of his house until the end of the film. Despite having placed these restrictions on the scope of the film (an experiment he would later repeat with Rope) Hitchcock was able to engineer what might be his most suspenseful film. Three years later audiences saw and loved 12 Angry Men, which was set solely in a jury room as the titular men attempt to argue out a verdict for a particularly tricky murder case. In recent years we’ve had Flightplan, Panic Room, Devil and best of all, little seen Spanish thriller Fermat’s Room, all of which keep their protagonists trapped in a fixed location. However, the key point of comparison for this film is 2002’s Phone Booth – an intriguing concept which saw its star Colin Farrell, held against his will inside a telephone booth as he attempted to negotiate his escape without being shot down by the sniper surveilling him.

Buried and Phone Booth share a few things in common. They are both, primarily, star-vehicles. It was in Phone Booth that Colin Farrell first proved he had the potential to be a decent actor. However, more impressive still is Ryan Reynold’s performance in Buried. What’s incredible about the performance is the surprising range that Reynold’s is able to showcase despite extremely limiting extraneous circumstances. Running the full emotional gauntlet without a psychological gambit left unexplored Reynold’s proves here that there’s a future for him in the movies that lies outside playing the Romantic lead in the latest dreary Hollywood rom-com.

Moreover, both Buried and Phone Booth confine their characters and force them to use the phone to attempt to save their lives. Where Buried differs from Phone Booth and a key reason why it is a significantly better film lies in the adept directorial handiwork of Rodrigo Cortés. His camerawork in particular deserves some plaudits – there isn’t an inch of the coffin left unscathed. By fixing the location and having only one real character on screen for the course of the whole film, the director always runs the risk of boring the audience. I can happily confess that I wasn’t bored once; I was too busy sharing in Paul’s fear, hope and desperation. This kind of sustained suspense is a real rarity. Just don't be fooled into thinking that the premise of this film isn't weighty enough to support it's 94-minute running time.