Buried

Movies with a specific gimmick intrigue me. I remember watching a movie that was split into four screens and the whole movie was showing the action from four different perspectives the entire time, or the hand-held camera gimmick, or a movie called Look which is shot in all security cameras. There are movies where the whole thing takes place in one room, or one set, or almost all one set. I love Phone Booth for that reason. I am also interested in movies that essentially ask us to watch 1 actor the entire time. Castaway is pretty much just us and Tom Hanks and to a certain extent, I am Legend is just us and Will Smith. It takes a pretty specific kind of actor to hold the screen without anyone else. When I first heard of Buried it was already cast. Ryan Reynolds buried alive in a casket and we see no one else. That was all I needed to be hooked into the idea. I have been a fan of Reynolds since Two Guys a girl and a Pizza Place, and am happy to see his recent success, but also happy he makes interesting project choices to feed his artistic soul along with the commercial projects.

Paul Conroy(Reynolds) wakes up in pitch black, completely unsure of where he is. He cannot move much, but he can get to his pockets and in his pocket is a lighter. He gets the lighter lit and realizes he has been buried alive. A phone rings. He does not get to it in time, but he has a phone and he calls his wife, and gets the machine. Next he tries to remember the special number he was given in case of emergency. The phone rings again and he answers. It is a man who says he wants 5 million dollars or Paul will be killed. Paul gets in touch with the F.B.I and tells him his name and that he is a civilian truck driver in Iraq. His pockets also have a pencil in them to write phone numbers on the inside of his coffin. The kidnapper wants him to make a hostage video with the phone and provides Paul with a script and lights. The man Paul is in contact with at the F.B.I thinks it is a bad idea, but Paul does not want to die and he wants to stall in hopes he will, somehow, he found.

Not only is Buried set in one location, the location is a coffin just a little bit longer, wider and deeper than Ryan Reynolds frame. In order to pull this off and not have it come off as just a gimmick or to even have it be a good movie, everyone involved has to be in top shape. Ridrigo Cortes directs and edits the movie from his own script and in his second feature length film, Cortes proves to be quite a talent. Buried is an intense thrill ride that manages to have twists and turns all without leaving a coffin. His script does a great job of giving the story an arc, but it really boils down to how the movie was made. It was very clever to give the audience different kinds of lights. It added this dimension to the film when we see the coffin lit at different times with a cell phone, the lighter, a flashlight that only occasionally worked and two of those neon green light sticks. Instead of needing to constantly edit and switch angles to keep things fresh, using these different lighting techniques really added that. Of course, the editing and camera angles and zooms in and out are important because, again, we are seeing a movie shot in basically a 7ft x 6ft x 5ft movie set.

Ryan Reynolds does a wonderful job as well. He clearly has no vanity in him as he is not afraid to totally lose his cool and go places that might come off as cheesy or over the top by an actor too afraid to fully commit, but he commits 100% and he rewards the audience with wonderfully claustrophobic performance that is all over the emotional map. He does not get to be too nuanced in the character, but he does get sympathy from the audience and there was never a time where I thought he was not literally trapped in a coffin. The voice acting from the various other people was all top notch as well and it really helped keep the tension moving to have the voices from these unseen people. Many movies would cut away to these other places, but because we only ever saw Reynolds reactions, it made the film seem smaller and that kind of feeling is absolutely necessary for this film to work.

Buried features the most intense scene involving a snake I have seen in a movie and that is saying something. it also left me exhausted, frustrated, tense and outright angry. It goes on longer than I thought it would, but it actually worked. I figured a movie with such a small scope should run about 80 minutes and if you take away the trailers, the movie still ran closer to 95 minutes. 15 minutes may not appear to be much, but trust me, many movies would be better if they shaved 15 minutes off. Yet this movie that should have felt bloated at 95 minutes, actually felt exactly right. Roger Ebert says a good movie can never be too long and a bad movie can never be too short and while I am not sure I agree with him, Buried makes every second of its run time count.

Final Grade: B+