Buried Review

With nothing but a cell phone, a bottle of anxiety pills, a flashlight and a knife, Paul Conroy finds himself trapped in a wooden coffin, with very little recollection of how he got there. He does not understand why, because he was just a truck driver making an honest living. As Paul frantically calls every number he can think of to try and get help, he begins to realize that he may in fact be trapped and he may not make it out alive.

This film is 95 minutes of pure tension. There is nothing but Paul Conroy trapped in a coffin and trying to desperately to escape. When it is said there is nothing more than Paul, it is honest. There is no other setting used in this movie other than that of the coffin. There are no other physical portrayals by actors, just one video appearance and a few voices on the phone. Despite the fact it is based in a small wooden box, Buried is still a really good movie. It is about one man struggling to find out all he can, while slowly coming to terms with the fact that he may die.

Ryan Reynolds is essentially the film. He is the only actor physically in the movie like already mentioned. At the beginning it seemed as though Reynolds was going to provide a boring generic portrayal, but as the tension builds so does his performance. His voice, his anger, his anxiety all becomes so real and life like. Reynolds proves to the audience watching Buried he can do just about anything, he held this film roughly for about 20 minutes longer than it needed to be.

Unfortunately the one downside to sticking within the Coffin is we never fully got to be aware of what exactly happened to Paul, we get a very odd description over the phone, one that does not clearly indentify what went wrong with Pauls convoy. One flashback scene could have done the trick and it would have added a visual component to what happened. Audio relay of what happened does not work extremely well for film purposes.

At the same time, the voice seems to be the one reason Paul is working so hard to stay alive. We hear him talking to a man who helps calm hostages, we see him trying to get a hold of people he loves and cares about. The voices do serve dramatic purposes, especially closer to the end of the movie when he his on the phone with Dan Brenner.

When it comes to the end, there is a bit of a debate, we here over the course of the movie about a man Dan Brenner had saved three weeks earlier named Mark White. When the end rolls around, it is a bit of a dramatic mess. They say they are close to tracking Paul but eventually stumble upon the grave of Mark White. It is never fully explained why trying to track Paul lead them to Marks grave because they were tracking the phone and the numbers Paul had given them. No one number can be tracked to the wrong place. Had they been tracking the number of Pauls phone it could not have lead them that far away from Paul, it may have lead them too a location very close, but not another place entirely. This was the one aspect of the film that is left up to interpretation and when you really think about it, it makes no sense with the rest of the film.

Despite the minor hiccup at the end Buried is still a very enjoyable film, with a surprising performance from Reynolds who seems like an odd choice for a film based solely around one man. Reynolds proved to the audience he can do it, which is why director Rodrigo Cortés wanted him in the first place. This film restores my faith in tense thriller films, while restoring my faith that Ryan Reynolds can hold his own and provide audiences with intense performances.


8/10