Review of Buried (2010) by Nick T — 27 Apr 2012

Allow me to jump straight to the point, Buried is a brilliant, Hitchcock-esque thriller and is one of my favourite films of the year.

Paul Conroy, a truck driver in Iraq wakes up to find himself buried in a coffin, with a lighter and a mobile phone. The film is intense throughout the whole film, keeping the viewer literately on the edge of their seat as they wait to discover Paul's story and witness the films inevitable resolution. One man in a box and only the voices of other characters but the film is kept gripping and entertaining through the entire 1 hour 30 minutes.

Ryan Reynolds is brilliant as Paul, displaying the full range of emotions throughout the film and just being an overall normal guy stuck in a terrifying position. His performance is rich with emotion, his character is brilliantly played out and he is perfectly cast as the helpless Paul.

The film is directed by Rodrigo Cortés, a Spanish director who deserves every bit of praise he can, not only is he able to pull an incredible performance from Ryan Reynolds, but also makes the audience believe that they are inside the coffin with Reynolds, not one angle, not one corner of the coffin is left unfilmed, adding a third dimension to the film as the viewer themselves feels claustrophobic and filed with anxiety. This is the mark of a visionary an amazing director.

The realism in the film deserves a quick mention as well, with only natural light used to shoot the film, leaving the audience is total darkness for at least 2 minutes at the very start of the film; the people in my screening actually believed the film was broken, through this you learn that 2 minutes is a VERY long time while watching a film. The script is intense, emotional, even funny at a couple of moments and the ending is haunting, but brilliant leaving nothing but total silence in the theatre.

The only thing going through my mind as I stepped out of Buried was how brilliant, ingenious, genuinely chilling and original it was but after that I began to think where on my top 20 films it is and thinking that I had just witnessed one of the greatest, if not THE greatest thriller and horror film of all time.