Buried

Rodrigo Cortés strikes me as the kind of guy who, as a child, would run his little legs around the playground, frantically waving his arms in the air at his onlooking miniature schoolmates, screaming, "Look what I can do! Look what I can do!" while doing somersaults and cartwheels over the steel jungle gym. In Buried, the Spanish director channels Alfred Hitchcock, setting out to film one actor lying inside a coffin for 94 whole minutes. That's just over an hour and a half consisting entirely of watching a dude reclining and sweating in a seven-foot-long box. And it's fucking brilliant.

Little word of advice: if you aren't fond of Ryan Reynolds, then Buried ain't for you; because there isn't a single second of the film in which he doesn't feature. We're trapped inside the coffin with him for the movie's full length; there are no cut-aways, no flashbacks, no nothing outside of his rectangular cell. Just a frightened Ryan Reynolds perspiring, panting and panicking all on his own.

The only lighting we have for most of the flick is from the burning fire of the lighter he holds, at other times from a faulty torch and luminous green glow stick he later finds at his feet. He has a cell phone - not his - through which he desperately calls people and begs for help. How he manages to get a signal when he's six-feet underground I don't know; I only have to stand under a cloud and my phone signal automatically buggers off.

Through conversations he has with several government officials over the increasingly powerless cell phone, we learn that his name is Paul Conroy. He was a truck driver working in Iraq as a private contractor when his convoy was ambushed by terrorists or extremists or insurgents or whatever. He was knocked out and, in the film's opening, woke up engulfed in darkness, his mouth gagged, his hands tied up, soon realising the enclosed situation he's been thrown into.

Paul is called by an unseen Iraqi rebel who took part in his horrifying predicament and is ordered to somehow get him $5 million using the phone provided. If he doesn't, they'll leave him to die and rot in his small, wooden cubicle. With his air running out and the phone's battery gradually expiring, Paul distraughtly dials and dials, his hope slowly disintegrating along with the surrounding oxygen.

My presumptions of Buried were that its curiously outlandish premise would sluggishly suffocate once its limitations had been stretched beyond their blatantly obvious boundaries. I'm man enough to admit that I was horrifically wrong; Buried is a remarkable and fascinating cinematic achievement.

To make a feature one hundred and ten percent revolve around a chap trapped inside such a small space is no easy feat, but to make every moment of it a nail-biting thrill-ride of suspense and terror is nothing short of extraordinary.

Cortés achieves the near impossible task of successfully putting the challenging plot to celluloid, putting his rich directing talent to good use, enhancing the edgy drama that is unfolding on-screen. The word, "drawback" must not appear in this man's dictionary, as he makes the most of what many others would find an overwhelmingly difficult chore. The camera revolves around the coffin, trickles over the top of it, utilizes overblown zooms to augment shock, and is still when necessary; it's staggering how visually exciting a coffin-set movie can be. He thinks outside the box, you might say.

Known more for his sarcastically-tongued roles in immature - although hilarious - comedies such as Just Friends and Waiting rather than his criminally underrated dramatic work, Reynolds effortlessly knocks the ball right out of the coffin and into the next state as Buried's only visible character. It's a testament to his excellent acting skills that he can carry the film's every moment purely on his own, confined to being stretched out inside a casket the entire time.

We, as an audience, are going through the motionless but emotionally wrenching journey with him; we feel the claustrophobia he is enduring and we discover things at the exact same time he does. Much flabbergasting sympathy is inspired from Reynolds' invigorating performance as an everyman forced into a nightmarish situation, made to battle it out for his survival.

With several other "fuck, I'm stuck" horrors such as Frozen and Devil to come out this year, Buried is the stand-out masterpiece. A tight script makes for a magnificently tense, edge-of-your seat, unique experience that will stay with you long after you leave the theatre. I really hope they do a sequel starring a suffocating Justin Bieber. I'd pay triple to see that.

10/10