The reception in here is crap

Buried is an experiment. With all of the major advances we have seen in film, and the recent onslaught of 3-dimensional everything, how much can be stripped back, without losing a modern audience? The answer is almost everything. Buried is, on the surface, a film which sees us in a box for 90 minutes, but it is at heart a very human story.

Ryan Reynolds plays main character Paul Conroy, a truck driver contracted in Iraq. His convoy have been ambushed, his colleagues killed. Having been knocked out, Paul awakes trapped in a coffin with only a mysterious cell phone, a lighter, a pencil and a small sliver of lingering hope in humanity. Paul has limited battery life, limited oxygen, and 90 minutes in which to give his captors what they want, or risk dying alone in the soil.

It would be naive to think that with all the stripping back needed for this film to work, that it could have reached the world stage without the addition of a major star. Nowadays people are so connected that stars are unfortunately one of the main driving forces of film. Thankfully Reynolds deals with this fact in his own masterful way. Here he sheds the dorky humour of his days in Two Guys and a Girl, sheds his status as one half of a Hollywood ‘power-couple’, sheds his charm, his humour, and even as his status of shirtless wonder on every ‘world’s sexiest list’. Buried will be the film that cements Reynolds as being much more than the average ‘leading man’ or tabloid fodder. Here he creates a character that it is possible to both love and hate, we care either way. Reynolds gives a truly organic performance. Believable from beginning to end.

We have other characters we have strong feelings for, yet we never see their faces. Each drawback becomes advantage. We are underground for 90 minutes, and yet our attention never falters. It is an edge-of-your-seat nail-biter.

Buried is a master class in building tension and fear in movies. It is Hitchcockian in its exploration of the politics of terror, and entirely 2010 in style. Buried will raise questions about the very nature of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. The way in which director Rodrigo Cortés has created an atmosphere that is massive in scope, using so little space is genius. Cortés builds visual tension to breaking point whilst writer Chris Sparling’s script does what so many thrillers fail to do, he takes us into Paul’s mind and throws us head-first into his world. As an audience we care so much that each and every time he flares up his little Zippo, we’re inwardly cursing him for wasting his precious oxygen.

Buried is a film which plays on the emotions of the audience. It is impossible to look away from the screen. Buried is a movie which is small in landscape, yet massive in heart, it needs no outside elements or film-trickery. This is a film unrestricted by its small landscape. No mean feat for a film of 2010. Not one for claustrophobes, but for everyone else, do not miss it. Buried is the best thriller of the year.

Ciara O’Brien