BURIED (2010)
An American truck driver working in Iraq wakes up to find he's been buried alive inside a coffin.

An American truck driver working in Iraq wakes up to find he's been buried alive inside a coffin.
The first five minutes of Buried are a tale of two halves. At first, there’s a cheesy opening credits sequence, with generic, overdone music that aims for high-intensity thrills without artfully drawing out these emotions. The preceding scene could not be more of a polar opposite, a painfully intimate affair, at first enshrouded in darkness as an unknown man breathes heavily. We hear the flick of a lighter before the world comes alive for a half second, revealing a brief snatch of light, a glimmer of a dirt-stained face with frightened eyes and brows glistening with sweat. More clicking sounds can be heard, emerging alongside ragged breaths, a worried look, and an environment that, just from the brief glimpses of light, looks like a tiny prison.
Buried is so effectively claustrophobic that one wishes they could witness this spectacle in the cinema rather than at home, so that protagonist Paul Conroy’s (Ryan Reynolds) confinement is made all the more absorbing. Paul wakes up in a wooden coffin without any idea about how he could have ended up in this state. Gradually, the circumstances that lead to him winding up here come to light, while Paul simultaneously scans his immediate surroundings for tools to aid him, coming across a mobile phone by his feet. In a tiny coffin, it’s not as if he can sit up or do a 180-degree turn, so instead, he must strain with all his might as he stretches one foot until it reaches his cell phone, before gingerly—but firmly—kicking it up towards him, where it’s just close enough for him to grasp.
It’s a nail-bitingly tense moment, where one can feel stabs of tension not in one’s heart, but up and down one’s legs, a desperate and torturous feeling that this movie is all too keen to exploit. Buried is at its best when it commits fully towards taking a realistic approach to depicting these circumstances; luckily, that constitutes the vast majority of its 95-minute runtime. For some, this will be a neat idea that overstays its welcome, more suited to a short film format than being worthy of a feature-length effort. But just as these claustrophobic, agonising moments of tension are brilliantly utilised in scenes that make you want to tear your eyes away from the screen (while simultaneously watching with close alertness and an empathy for Paul’s circumstances that feels almost crippling), by never leaving Paul’s sight, it feels as if time really is slowly running out for him to stay alive.
It becomes clear early on that Paul’s life is entirely in other people’s hands, whether that involves the people who placed him in this environment, or the Hostage Working Group, a team trying to find Paul that he gets into contact with through his cell phone. While this protagonist is resourceful enough to call as many people as he can think of to alert the proper authorities of his position, that is about all that he can do in the way of securing his freedom. He’s just one man, a statement that’s often used in uplifting terms in action films and a feverishly patriotic lens in war movies. But screenwriter Chris Sparling is sensible enough not to dilute the movie’s drama by having Paul ascend too easily to the role of this story’s hero. Such a narrative turn implicitly intertwines victimhood with cowardice, excoriating the former by implying that it exists merely as a mindset than a reflection of one’s conditions.
But Buried, set in 2006 in Iraq, when war was still being waged in that country by invading US forces, knows full well that a harsh backdrop like this could make victims of any of us, whether American or Iraqi. Paul regularly pleads with his unseen captor over the phone, but his attempts at eliciting empathy understandably go unappreciated. Innocent men, women, and children die all the time in these conflicts; this protagonist’s references to his loved ones are meaningless in such a cynical world. The most bitter lesson of all, though, is that this does not just apply to Paul’s captor’s; throughout this journey, Paul will come to reckon with the fact that his country’s representatives in these affairs only possess allegiance towards their government. If his life is to fall to the wayside, it would merely be a blip on their radar.
It’s this interplay between anger towards the outside world and admiration at this man’s determination that keeps this high-intensity survival thriller roaring to life. Paul is truly alone, with two instances of heightened realism that do well to depict this painful, crushing feeling, as the camera moves upwards in one instance and to Paul’s left in the other. These two moments convey an environment that is suddenly far bigger than anything we have come to see thus far. Even if it’s obvious that such depictions aren’t literal, they risk dispelling the heart-racing intensity of Paul’s claustrophobic conditions. They never do, because Sapling and director Rodrigo Cortés have created a full, lived-in experience across Buried‘s runtime, conveying enough of a journey across this brief window of time in Paul’s life to justify these scenes of quiet despair.
It’s a masterful achievement given how little the pair have to work with, but these restraints end up being the film’s greatest strength. Without any other locations to divert to, Cortés can’t rely on clever transitions to convey a passage of time. He does not need to; Sapling’s cleverly composed screenplay ensures that little trickery is needed in this razor-sharp thriller. Almost the entirety of Buried’s runtime plays out in real-time, making this rescue mission feel authentically bleak the longer the minutes roll by without salvation in sight. Instead, there are the shimmering lights of a mobile phone, a lighter, a torch and glow sticks. These devices, alongside the film’s close-up shots of this protagonist, only emphasise his despair. We can clearly see his sweat-stained brows, terrified eyes darting around this tiny box, dried blood glistening over his neck and chin, and patches of mud and dirt that give him a weathered look.
Reynolds plays it all to perfection, too, even in an extended opening scene with hardly any dialogue, but which contains near-constant and pronounced inhalations and exhalations of breath. It’s an easy thing to overlook, but it’s masterful that the Canadian actor can acutely convey the inner workings and expressions of anxiety of a character that is always a half-step away from letting their panic descend into hysterics.
But for as tense and thrilling as Buried is, the film is continually held back by a bland score that never contributes to the experience. This soundtrack is also painfully repetitive, hitting the same beats again and again as it mistakenly assumes that such a tired approach towards trying to unnerve viewers will elicit a jolt of energy in them. There are some harsh zoom ins and outs that are incredibly cheesy given how restrained the rest of the film is in this regard, while the denouement, though effectively harrowing, lacks a definitive punch to hammer home the weight of this otherwise gripping movie.
There are also some bum notes in the screenwriting that should’ve been excised, spilling over so that the film winds up being roughly 10 minutes too long for its own good. Not only does Buried’s length exhaust this grand experiment in uncomfortable intimacy, a scene involving both a fire and a snake, when accompanied by a score that feels like it has been on autopilot the entire film in more amped-up moments like this, is bereft of any real tension.
But on the whole, Cortés and Sparling are remarkably in-sync in depicting a desperate scenario, and having no reservations about plunging into figurative and literal depths to convey it. Buried is a thrilling yet crushing watch, and a worthy filmmaking experiment that, in keeping with its director’s Alfred Hitchcock influences (notably 1944’s Lifeboat and 1948’s Rope), does justice to the legendary English director’s works. While Reynolds clearly offers the stand-out performance here, praise should also be levied at the rest of the cast members (particularly Stephen Tobolowsky, Robert Paterson, and José Luis García Pérez), for making their characters feel lived-in and believable solely through voice acting. They manage to do so much with so little; maybe that is the reason why their acting—and Buried as a whole—is so absorbing.
SPAIN • UK • FRANCE • USA | 2024 | 95 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH
director: Rodrigo Cortés.
writer: Chris Sparling.
starring: Ryan Reynolds, José Luis García Pérez, Robert Paterson, Stephen Tobolowsky, Cade Dundish, Samantha Mathis & Warner Loughlin.