Buried (***)

This is like some kind of stunt moviemaking exercise. Come up with something you can make with one actor who never leaves a space not much larger than the size of the actor. Oh, and nothing can be brighter than the light from a cell phone or a cigarette lighter. And make it suspenseful. There you’ve described the cinematic challenge director Rodrigo Cortés and his leading man, Ryan Reynolds, had in adapting a script by Chris Sparling. Surprisingly, perhaps, they succeed.

Fading in from a black screen, Cortés dispenses with flashbacks or complicated back stories. Reynolds pants and grunts a lot. Lucky he has the lighter, since he doesn’t appear to be a smoker. A cell phone that shortly rings, and is his lifeline, shows Arabic text. We learn that the unfortunate man is an American working as a truck driver in Iraq, and he is in a coffin, underground. For some reason, at no point does he use the helpful explanatory phrase “buried alive.” The action is mostly, though not entirely, a series of phone calls. Varying the camera angles, Cortés manages to convey the claustrophobia without the film becoming monotonous. Air and light and the cell-phone battery may all run out, and they’re not the only peril. A couple of plot points I found questionable—would a man whose phone battery shows only one bar really call his senile mother unless he’d already given up hope? But mostly the behavior we witness is that you’d expect of someone scared, desperate, and unprepared for what might be his last 90 minutes of life.

For me this was still a little gimmicky—I didn’t have that much of an emotional response to the man’s predicament. I felt as I had watching the thriller Phone Booth, in which Colin Farrell was frozen in place by a sniper. Ironically, the cell phone, the key to this movie’s plot, has rendered the pay-phone-oriented plot of that 2003 movie nearly obsolete at this point. But in any case, in both movies it’s the puzzle aspect of the story that is the prime interest. The endings I had in mind for Buried were all a bit trite, so I was pleased that the actual conclusion was not one I’d foreseen.

IMDB link

viewed 9/22/10 [screening at Ritz East] and reviewed 10/1/10