Buried is high concept, low budget and entirely engaging. It is basically 90 minutes of footage that plays on a fear so primal that it doesn’t quite stand erect. That fear, as the title callously suggests, is being buried alive, and I imagine that it provokes the kind of feeling within the viewer that is usually achieved by watching a snuff movie. No other film gives such an acute, prolonged sense of tension and terror, and it is as refreshing as it is distressing. If you’re at all claustrophobic and you feel the blackness of the open viewing room begin to press in on you as you watch, just wait until that night when you lay in bed. I’ve lain awake with a lunatic grin before.
Buried stars sometime humourhunk Ryan Reynolds as Paul Conroy, a man who groggily regains consciousness in darkness with a gag in his mouth and his hands tied together. After several minutes of wordless struggle in the pitch black he frees his Zippo lighter and can take in his surroundings. Discovering he is in a small, cheap, crate-style coffin he goes through various stages of panic, eventually removing his bonds and calming himself with unconvincing murmurings.
Soon Conroy finds that he is not completely alone in his tomb, as a sack of items including a mobile phone, flick knife, glow stick and shoddy torch has been left by his unseen captors. It is the kind of unlikely assortment that had me thinking about LucasArts adventure games from the early 90s. He is trapped in a shallow grave through which the signal of the local mobile network can penetrate, and through various unhelpful calls we learn that he is a US lorry driver in Iraq whose convoy was attacked, presumably leading to his current predicament.
A combination of elements make this film worthy of praise, because the daring concept could have been boring if things like pacing and dialogue were not bang on target. Conroy’s relatively realistic character is never hampered by entirely improbable events or afflicted by deliberately skewed decisions which serve only to further the plot, so you don’t feel like the filmmakers are cheating at any point. Also, despite the fact that the film focuses on a single location and a single onscreen character, the clever use of sets, shots and lighting mean that the perspective on the action is rarely static without detracting from the sense of crushing incarceration.
Go and see Buried. You do get breathing space for short periods in this intense experience, and it actually delivers on the overarching conceit in a surprising way. You’ll have to watch it to find out. Reynolds is functional as this slowly disintegrating everyman, and his history of stupid romantic comedies and action films doesn’t weight too heavily on his presence here. You might have a tough time getting his hilarious aftershave ad out of your head, though.
