- UK release: October 2010
- Director: Rodrigo Cortes · Writer: Chris Sparling
- Studio / distributor: Versus Entertainment; The Safran Company; Icon Film Distribution (UK)
- Genre: Survival thriller / single-location thriller · Runtime: 95 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Ryan Reynolds (The Proposal, Smokin’ Aces) as Paul Conroy; Samantha Mathis (Pump Up the Volume, American Psycho) as the voice of Linda Conroy; Robert Paterson as the voice of Dan Brenner; Jose Luis Garcia Perez as the voice of Jabir
- IMDb: 7.0 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 87% critics / 65% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Every few years a film turns up that sounds, on paper, like a dare. One actor, one set, one idea, and a running time that has to be filled honestly because there is nowhere to cut away to. Buried is the purest version of that dare I have seen since Phone Booth boxed Colin Farrell into a glass cabinet, and it goes considerably further: Rodrigo Cortes shuts Ryan Reynolds inside a wooden coffin, drops the lid, and refuses to leave. No flashbacks, no cuts to the surface, no helpful exterior shots of a rescue team mobilising. The camera stays underground with him for the duration. Whether that is a brilliant exercise in tension or ninety-five minutes of self-imposed punishment is the question the film sets itself, and for most of its length it lands on the right side of the line.
The setup
Paul Conroy is an American lorry driver working a contract in Iraq. He comes round in the dark, in pain, and works out by degrees that he has been buried alive in a coffin somewhere in the desert. His captors have left him two things: a Zippo lighter and a mobile phone, the second of which becomes his only thread back to the world above. The film is the record of his calls. He rings the emergency services, his employer, the State Department, his family, and a hostage negotiator, while his air thins, the battery drops, and the people he reaches prove variously useless, evasive and bound by procedure. The clock is the oxygen, and you feel every minute of it draining.
The cast
This is, by any honest measure, a one-man film, and it lives or dies on Reynolds. He is best known for charm and a quick line, the leading-man smirk of The Proposal and the gloss of Smokin’ Aces, and the smart move here is to strip all of that away and leave a frightened, ordinary man trying to stay calm enough to be understood down a crackling line. He is sweaty, furious, pleading and exhausted in turn, and he holds the screen with nothing to play against but a phone and the dark. The supporting cast exists only as voices, which is its own kind of casting challenge. Samantha Mathis gives Paul’s wife a tender, helpless presence by phone, and Robert Paterson’s negotiator carries the maddening calm of a man following a script while a life runs out. The disembodied bureaucrats, all hold music and call transfers, do more to raise the blood pressure than any villain on screen could.
The craft
The craft is where Buried earns its keep. Cortes and cinematographer Eduard Grau had every excuse to shoot the thing flat and static, and instead they treat the coffin as a set to be lit and framed a dozen different ways: the sickly orange of the lighter, the cold wash of the phone screen, a few moments of total black that are braver than anything in a louder film. The camera prowls, tilts and pulls back further than a box that size should allow, and the geography stays legible even as the angles refuse to settle. Victor Reyes contributes a nervy, Herrmann-flavoured score that knows when to swarm and when to leave Paul alone with his own breathing. The sound design is the unsung hero: the scrape of fingernails on wood, the rattle of grit through a seam, the hiss of a phone losing signal. It is a film assembled from very little, and the seams never show.
How it stacks up
The obvious shelf-mate is Phone Booth, another stunt-premise thriller that traps a man in a confined space with only a phone for company, though that one keeps a city and a sniper in play around its lead. Buried is more austere, and the comparison that flatters it most is the single-location chamber piece rather than the studio thriller: think of the disciplined dread of The Vanishing, the original Dutch version, where the horror is the idea of being shut underground rather than anything you are shown. It is also a relation of the contained survival picture, the lone protagonist against an indifferent situation, though here the antagonist is as much corporate and governmental indifference as it is the sand overhead. Few films have committed to a single restriction this completely and still come out as cinema rather than gimmick.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have largely taken to it, sitting around 87%, praising the discipline, the sound work and Reynolds. Audiences are notably cooler, closer to 65%, and the split is easy to read. This is a deliberately airless, claustrophobic experience that some viewers will find unbearable rather than thrilling, and the ending divides people sharply. I am with the critics on the craft and somewhere between the two camps on the feeling. The conceit can tip from tense into punishing, and there is a stretch in the middle where the phone calls start to feel like a structure being serviced. But the execution is so assured that the wobble never sinks it.
Verdict
What stops Buried being a mere stunt is that the restriction is doing something. The helplessness, the call-centre runaround, the sense of a man’s life reduced to a low priority on someone else’s checklist, all of it lands harder for being trapped in the box with him. It is tense, intelligent, beautifully made on next to no money, and anchored by the best dramatic work Reynolds has done. It loses a point for the sheer grimness of the watch and a slightly schematic middle, and I would not call it a film to put on lightly twice. But as a piece of pure thriller engineering it is close to flawless, and I came out admiring almost everything about how it was built. 8⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now through Icon, on limited release. One to catch on the biggest screen you can, in the dark, before it surfaces on DVD.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Reynolds went on to far bigger things, and his run at superhero comedy with Deadpool (2016) made him a household name, which makes this stripped-back, single-room performance look even more like the moment he proved he could carry a serious film alone. Buried has settled into its reputation as one of the best single-location thrillers of its era, regularly cited alongside Locke (2013), Steven Knight’s one-man, one-car drama that took the same dare a few years later. It is now widely available on disc and streams on the usual digital platforms depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong language, once very strong, and sustained threat. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Threat and horror: The narrative takes place inside the claustrophobic setting of a coffin buried underground, with the environment and situation creating a sustained sense of threat and terror throughout.
Language: There is infrequent use of very strong language (‘c**t’), and occasional use of strong language (‘f**k’).
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
