It took about 15 minutes – maybe a little more – for the audience to catch on. “Is the whole film going to be like this?” someone behind me asked his friends in a strained voice, making a joke with the niggly feeling that it might not be a joke. It wasn’t a joke. Buried is 95 minutes of one actor in one tiny setting, the actor being Ryan Reynolds, the setting being the inside of a coffin where Ryan’s character – an American contractor working as a truck driver in Iraq – has been buried alive by insurgents. That’s it. That’s the whole movie.
It’s tempting to say that any film made with such extreme limitations must be counted a success if it’s watchable – and Buried is a lot more than watchable, nail-bitingly tense and (of course) claustrophobic. But it doesn’t only work as an ingenious B-movie. Perhaps because it’s made by Europeans (the director and most of the crew are Spanish), the film goes further than most – certainly further than Hollywood’s rather hesitant war-in-Iraq movies – in a scathing picture of the US occupation, showing (or implying) a shabby set-up where government agencies and big corporations care only about spin, profits and bad publicity while ordinary people on both sides are … well, dead and buried.
20 years ago, the plot couldn’t have worked at all, because Ryan would’ve been totally alone in that coffin – and of course helpless, unless he managed to claw his way out like The Bride in Kill Bill, Vol. 2. Now, however, he has a friend – a small plastic friend with impressive powers, though unfortunately limited battery. The people who’ve buried Ryan have also chucked a mobile phone in the coffin, and most of the film consists of our hero having desperate, increasingly fraught phone conversations with both kidnappers and potential saviours. (I’m sure there’s already an academic somewhere touting Buried as a metaphor for modern life, where we live on the phone while buried in the coffin of our own atomisation.)
Admittedly this raises plausibility issues, because mobile phones can be traced. Why would kidnappers supply their victim with the only means to call the authorities and divulge his location? There are other problems. Ryan’s priorities often seem a little confused, so for instance he doesn’t use the phone to call his office, or someone in Iraq who can help; instead he calls 911 in the States, then Directory Enquiries to get the FBI’s number – only to find, of course, that people in America are puzzled and suspicious when he says he’s calling from a wooden box Somewhere in Iraq. Later, when the kidnappers get in touch (turns out they had a reason for leaving him the mobile), he doesn’t immediately pass on their number – nor, later still, does he hasten to pass on the number of his cell-phone to the helpful-sounding Brit who’s trying to rescue him (instead, his first impulse is to call his wife). You also wonder how he doesn’t run out of oxygen, especially with all the shouting, cursing and hyperventilating – though he does admit that he “can’t breathe”.
The film, too, is breathless – so effective that most of those problems barely register, except later on when you’re thinking about it. Director Cortes opens in pitch-blackness with the sound of someone straining to breathe, then the flame of a lighter – the film uses only available light, another reason why the phone (with its phosphorescent screen) comes in handy – and Ryan’s fists banging on the wooden lid; the sense of a circumscribed space is very strong. Cortes isn’t rigid about following Aristotelian unities, and the camera does escape in one scene – pulling back, as if the coffin were open on one side, to show Ryan huddled in his dungeon like a foetus in the womb – but Buried makes a virtue of simplicity, and of course it’s also inspirational as a low-tech European riposte to the US-led marketplace (albeit made with some US money, and of course a well-known star in the lead role).
Those who crave spectacle might get bored with Buried, and start to quibble. The kidnapper on the phone is unconvincing, speaking pidgin English one moment then making elaborate puns – “Because you are terrified, that makes me a terrorist?” – and talking about 9/11. Two scenes (a snake and an amputation) struck me as cheap shots, a way of stretching the material to feature length. On the other hand, when it gets emotional – Ryan’s call to his senile mother, or his “last will and testament” – Buried cuts surprisingly deep, for a gimmicky thriller. Flaws and all, it worked for me. I was on the edge of my seat, from taut opening to remarkably ballsy ending – but I think the guy behind me left early, or at least I didn’t hear any more comments. He probably still can’t believe that they made a film, in the age of Transformers and Avatar, that’s just Ryan Reynolds in a tiny wooden box. But they did.
