Buried 2010 Dir: Rodrigo Cortés

...Black screen. Muffled, acoustic grunts. The sharp, high concept thriller has you enclosed with Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) from the beginning, right through 90 minutes to its climactic close. Conroy is a truck driver ambushed in Iraq by insurgents and wakes up in to a claustrophobic living hell with only a mobile phone and cigarette lighter in his pocket.

The story unfolds for Conroy as it does for us butt-clenched in the audience. Keeping the suspense so successfully on this limited stage requires masterful cinematography and it is provided so skilfully by Edward Grau. Try shining a torch in to a shoe box for 90 minutes and see how long it takes before you get bored and turn the kettle on. Grau finds every interesting crevice, splintered corner and dark fissure. But Reynolds also shows he can go beyond the smirking, grandiloquent character he was in danger of being typecast. His panic etched on his face as deep as the claw marks in my armrest.

We are kept acutely on edge by the excellent dialogue with the interaction over the mobile that keeps Conroy in touch with the world beyond his shallow grave. Corporate duplicity and political double entendre are intertwined with heart wrenching calls to home. In one of his calmer colloquy’s home is to his mother, now living in a rest home coping with Alzheimer’s his situation is mirrored half way across the world, trapped in her own living hell, she frustrates Reynolds with her suppression but both find a glimmer of light in memories of happier times.

At times the story loses traction for the desire to keep 90 minutes of incident. There’s an unnecessary interaction with an uninvited guest shoehorned in to maintain the anxiety.

But when on track the tale is a Hitchcockian in its examination of anxiety on the human mind through a simple set piece.

Verdict: Indie feel to this high suspense thriller makes for an excellent exploration of everyone’s worse nightmare. Claustrophobic and uncomfortable this will leave you wanting to stick your head out of a window and take a deep breath.