Review of Buried (2010) by Zaw M — 01 Aug 2015

"Good artists copy, great artists steal." The maxim accredited to Picasso works wonders when speaking about the career of Rodrigo Cortes, the Spanish director bringing his first English language feature Buried to audiences. His first feature in his native tongue, Concursante/The Contestant, opened with the death of its protagonist whilst the same protagonist narrates via voice over, in the exact manner of Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. For his follow-up, Cortes continues his updating of the Golden Age of Hollywood with something in keeping with Hitchcock's great American thrillers.

Somewhere between the claustrophobia of Rope and the dumb fun of North by Northwest, Ryan Reynolds awakens inside a seven by two by two foot box with no idea how he ended up there. In keeping with Hollywood tradition, all we know from the start is that it is Ryan Reynolds in the box, not his character. Through an effective tried-and-tested drip-feed narrative, we learn that Ryan Reynolds is a truck driver (the first of many head-scratching revelations) posted out in Iraq with only two hours to make a hostage plea and gain a ransom. Silly, certainly, but only as silly as Cary Grant being chased by a crop-dusting bi-plane in the middle of an empty field.

The elephant in the room from the first five minutes is how long the wafer-thin premise can possibly last, and to his credit Cortes neither allows Reynolds' Paul Conroy out of the box nor to escape to his loved ones via flashback. To keep things interesting, Paul has to struggle around the box, juggling various items such as a pencil, a lighter and a glowstick which he happens to have been buried with (head scratch #2), whilst sand, snakes and terrorist threats pour inside to disturb him. These factors reek of being set pieces but only days after viewing: on immediate watching, you cannot help but will Paul on to escape his subterranean fate, and only occasionally question how he gets more signal in a box buried thirty feet underground on the outskirts of Iraq than most flats in the suburbs of Liverpool.

Even the look and feel of the film never has a dull moment. The cinematography of Eduard Grau suitably mixes in classic cinema, with a tunnel-like opening realisation of the burial taken straight from a Fritz Lang textbook, to the various shades of lighting depending on the lo-fi nature of the cigarette lighter or the neon glowstick. To command the Hitchcockian vibe, Jorge Calvo emulates Saul Bass's opening title work and Victor Reyes opens the film with a tense tribute to some of Bernard Herrmann's best scores. Chris Sparling's screenplay, like the best of Hitchcock, makes utterly no sense on second viewing (Why would Paul's captors make it so hard for him to make a ransom video? Even the terrorists in Iron Man made an electromagnet to keep Tony Stark alive).

These utterly dumb factors give Buried less a bad reputation to set off sparks in an internet forum, but more to grant the film the nostalgic sensibilities it deserves. Remember the days when a film could get away with far more plot holes? There are sites longer than the Great Wall of China dedicated to nitpicking Joss Whedon's Avengers Assemble, yet far fewer people seem to worry about why Dorothy imagines the fellow farmers as lions and scarecrows and tin (oh my!). Besides, Cortes barely gives his audience a chance to breathe or worry about these plot holes: as soon as Paul gets in contact with intelligence officials, a snake manages to slither in leading to a terrifying pyrotechnic episode.

It would be easy to patronise Buried by giving it credit solely for its 17 day shoot or deliberately throwback script, but Cortes makes one of the most entertainingly brainless thrillers in years. Reynolds breaks away from the charismatic, one-note, romantic lead to play the everyman, and whilst this may not be totally believable (I'll say it again - Ryan Reynolds is a truck driver??!) he still pulls heart strings as if they were his only escape from the box. The post-9/11 politics and government conspiracy can be totally disregarded: this is entertainment cinema purely and simply. Were the box a little bigger, Hitchcock probably would have made a signature cameo.