BURIED Directed by Rodrigo Cortés. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Dan Brenner, Jose Luis Garcia-Perez, Stephen Tobolowsky, Samantha Mathis 15A cert, gen release, 95 min
IF YOU’VE glanced across the credits for this excellent high- concept thriller, you will – aware the film concerns Ryan Reynolds buried in a box – have noted that the cast list runs to about six or seven people.
So Rodrigo Cortés’s film is not quite so daring, after all. He has, you deduce, felt compelled to include footage of worried relatives and frantic rescue workers.
Not a bit of it. Those other actors contribute only their voices. Making Hitchcock's Lifeboatseem like The Big Country, causing Phone Boothto appear as expansive as Gone With the Wind,Buried takes place entirely within the confines of a small wooden box.
Reynolds plays a truck driver, employed in Iraq, who wakes up to find himself sheathed in darkness and almost incapable of movement. Buried several feet beneath the desert, he has only a telephone, a lighter and a pencil for company. He tries phoning home, but nobody is in. He phones the State Department and gets put on hold.
In between juggling unhelpful officials and screaming despairingly at the coffin lid, he receives a phone call from his kidnappers. They want him to make a video with the phone and allow them to post it on the internet.
As in Lifeboat, much of the tension hangs around the viewer's worry that the film-makers may quickly exhaust the limited possibilities offered by their insanely restrictive scenario. Rather brilliantly, by giving Reynolds (who proves his chops with a performance run through with tangible desperation) a series of increasingly frustrating telephonic options, Cortés infuses the piece with a surprising array of tones and moods.
A deadly intruder provides material for a fine close-quarters (what else?) action sequence. Conversations between the hero and his wife are properly moving. Reynolds’s efforts to communicate with uninterested receptionists half-a-world away are blackly hilarious.
Buried even manages to offer some useful, mature commentary on the conflict in Iraq. It really is astonishing how much you can fit into a seven-foot-long box.
