Buried (2010)
Directed by Rodrigo Cortés
As an American civilian truck driver working in Iraq, Paul Conroy's convoy is attacked by a group of Iraqi insurgents. Some time later, Paul awakes in a coffin with only a lighter, a cell phone, and his ever-growing anxiety. Faced with a dwindling oxygen supply and a dying battery, he must fight panic, despair, and delirium as he races against time to escape the claustrophobic death trap.
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21 films that influenced Buried
What critics say influenced Buried
But as anyone who watched Hitchcock play with space and tension in Rope and Lifeboat will know, limited room invites a lot of cinematic invention, and newcomer Cortes has the skill to make his 90 minute experiment work brilliantly.
The film's hemmed-in parameters court comparisons with Hitchcock's "Lifeboat," which confined virtually all its activity to a World War II-era lifeboat bobbing on a rear-projection ocean.
From Lifeboat to Phone Booth, single setting films have used the limitations of their settings to facilitate incredible tension and drama, and Buried – one of the most extreme single setting films yet – does exactly this.
Granted, this isn't the first film to exist in a confined locale as others have taken place in single rooms and director Joel Schumacher kept Colin Farrell in an old-fashioned place for making calls for most of the appropriately titled "Phone Booth."
Like Buried (and Joel Shumacher's similarly stripped-back Phone Booth), at that movie's heart was a great, simple concept - two men, trapped in a room, forced to resolve their situation or die there.
It’s a bit like 2002’s Phone Booth, only where said phone booth has been tipped on its side, buried somewhere in the Middle East and is occupied by Ryan Reynolds ( The Proposal , X-men Origins: Wolverine ).
From Lifeboat to Phone Booth, single setting films have used the limitations of their settings to facilitate incredible tension and drama, and Buried – one of the most extreme single setting films yet – does exactly this.
Wouldn't it be interesting, I thought, if the film never left the box, like a more extreme version of the 2003 thriller Phone Booth, in which Colin Farrell was essentially chained to pay phone by a psychopath?
With "Buried," director Rodrigo Cortés and actor Ryan Reynolds engage in the kind of extreme real-time filmmaking once practiced by Alfred Hitchcock in "Rope" (and, more recently, on "24"), setting up an experiment in limitation that, at least until the movie's deflating final payoff, manages to tap into our deepest anxieties.
But as anyone who watched Hitchcock play with space and tension in Rope and Lifeboat will know, limited room invites a lot of cinematic invention, and newcomer Cortes has the skill to make his 90 minute experiment work brilliantly.
The claustrophobic setting, ticking clock and innocent-man theme are reminiscent of "Rope," in which Alfred Hitchcock used the limitations of time and space as production design elements.
But almost instantly the movie feels like an offshoot of the “Saw’’ horror franchise, in which characters awake to find themselves trapped in a game for their lives.
It's kind of like if Saw were a one-man show in a tiny theater.
His unseen captors have a sadistic side — perhaps they’ve seen Saw? They’ve left Conroy with a cellphone that miraculously works better under the Iraq desert than it would in your basement at home.
…horror scenario on par with the original Saw.
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Chris Sparling’s script takes place in 2006 (was it written then?), so perhaps he intended it as a pointed comment on the war—but it’s actually just a clever topical adaptation on the old Lucille Fletcher radio drama (and Barbara Stanwyck movie) Sorry, Wrong Number; Sparling even wraps things up with a variation on Fletcher’s classic last line.
There's not even a view from immediately above (a vantage point that was perhaps the most chilling aspect of the Dutch buried-alive thriller The Vanishing, from 1988).
Capably acting his way out of a tight situation, Reynolds channels a measure of Bruce Willis’ “Die Hard” hero John McClane, as the isolated Conroy, longing for his family and struggling to keep his cool, is forced to develop trusting relationships with those he can’t see.
The movie also is similar to and lesser than the lunacy in Adrian Lyne’s shocker “Jacob’s Ladder’’ or the overcooked nonsense of the 2004 B-movie “Cellular,’’ in which Chris Evans tries to save Kim Basinger’s life through a mobile phone connection.
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…buried ★★★★ out of 4 stars Cinematographer Eduard Grau, who also shot Tom Ford's ravishing "A Single Man," films the proceedings with sinister elegance.
But back to my point: that at any given juncture, Paul's terror is a different flavor of panicked, which Cortés visualises in a number of different ways, aided by the extremely valuable talents of Eduard Grau, the young cinematographer whose only other prominent work has been last year's grimly over-conceived A Single Man .
Cortés and cinematographer Eduard Grau ("A Single Man"), the heavy lifter here, use all kinds of tricks.
Lit by way of a Zippo, a cellular phone, a flashlight and a flare, cinematographer Eduard Grau (2009's " A Single Man ") impresses in the amount of different camera setups he is able to achieve, as well as in the different shades of color that punctuate the image depending on what Paul is using for light at any given moment.
Cinematographer Eduard Grau, whose previous work includes the sumptuous A Single Man (2009) does an amazing job making this film visually engaging.
Yet cinematographer Eduard Grau ( A Single Man ) constantly innovates with his angles and framing, making exceptional use of diegetic light sources such as a flickering flame and a mobile’s screen glow.
From the Vertigo-style movie poster to the Psycho slashes of Victor Reyes’ pulse-pounding score, the master’s influence is everywhere.