Buried – Review

You can only bury a man six feet deep.

Historians claim the logic behind this still widely practiced tradition, stems from the 1600′s in England during the Great Plague, to prevent disease from spreading. Director Rodrigo Cortes proves that even though a man is buried six feet under, you can still pile on more dirt. Buried is one of the more gripping, tense, suspenseful films in quite awhile, a feat that would make Hitchcock blush and Edgar Allan Poe smile.

The plot can be summed up easier than anything IMDb could write up. A man wakes up buried alive, with a lighter and a half-charged cell phone. Within that one sentence, Rodrigo Cortes tells it all in the coffin that could be Paul Conroy’s (Ryan Reynolds) final resting spot. From the outset, the dialogue is superb. It has to be, since we never see anyone else other than Paul, and all of the film’s action is contained with Paul’s conversations on the cell phone. This small confinement doesn’t limit Cortes visually, though. Instead, he uses zooms, cuts, and pans, all of which leads into furthering the intensity of the situation, and killing hope one breathe at a time for Paul and the audience.

Buried‘s enemy is hope. It drives Paul to continue on even though he suffers from anxiety, even though his wife isn’t answering, even when he finds a horrific Youtube video of his kidnapper’s killing a friend, even when the lid of the coffin is loosing to the weight of the dirt. If Cortes delivers on the hope, would the film be better for it or worse off? The hope of this rescue happening is what drives us through the film, and with a ending that will either be praised or ruin the experience for certain viewers, Buried kills hope, a rare feat that makes this trek – all told from within a coffin – an uncompromising beast. Not for the claustrophobic, but a rarity in modern film making: less is more.

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