Buried (12A.)
Directed by Rodrigo Cortes. 2010
Starring Ryan Reynolds, Robert Paterson, Jose Luis Garcia-Perez, Stephen Tobolowsky, Samantha Mathis. 94 mins.
Buried begins where another film might end – with a man (Reynolds) waking up in a coffin, buried deep underground. The instant hook for the audience is not how he will get out of there, but how the filmmakers will.
Faced with an hour and a half of a man in a box, the immediate assumption is that the time will be padded out with flashbacks to how he got there, or by alternating with a story on the surface. In fact their solution is to give him a mobile phone, some light sources and do the whole film right here in the box.
Do they pull it off? Well, the first time I checked my watch 55 minutes had gone and they’d just flown by so it has few problems holding your interest.
The cinematographer is the same man who shot A Single Man so the inside of a box has rarely looked so good. The young Spanish director allows himself a few non realistic shots and it has to be said that it does seem to a uniquely spacious coffin, you never really share his claustrophobia.
For the most part it stays honest but at the start of the third act the script tries to crank up the sense of danger with a twist involving him suddenly discovering something in his pocket and it’s too much of a movie moment, it weakens your faith in the film.
The film’s most contentious choice is to be an Iraq film. The man is a civilian contractor, a truck driver whose convoy was attacked by insurgents.
The Iraq setting is jarring, only partly because the film is quite heavy handed with its political point making. A man in a box is an everyman and a nobody, a man without context and an audience can identify with his dilemma as some kind of fiendish, rather warped, Roald Dahl style tale. When a current affairs context is supplied, when he becomes a small part of a larger horror, it sucks a lot of the fun out of it. It turns it into The Hurt Coffin.
While I was impressed by the movie, I was never particularly gripped by it and I never really cared if Ryan Reynolds got out or not. Nothing against him or his performance it’s just that I think the film suffers from an intensified level of the dilemma that any “realistic” horror movie/ chillers has to deal with. Audience instinctively side with a credible protagonist in a believable dilemma. They pull for them to survive, but simultaneously they feel a bit betrayed if they do, like the film makers are treating them like children. So once they’ve put him in the box, they really have no way out.
Directed by Rodrigo Cortes. 2010
Starring Ryan Reynolds, Robert Paterson, Jose Luis Garcia-Perez, Stephen Tobolowsky, Samantha Mathis. 94 mins.
Buried begins where another film might end – with a man (Reynolds) waking up in a coffin, buried deep underground. The instant hook for the audience is not how he will get out of there, but how the filmmakers will.
Faced with an hour and a half of a man in a box, the immediate assumption is that the time will be padded out with flashbacks to how he got there, or by alternating with a story on the surface. In fact their solution is to give him a mobile phone, some light sources and do the whole film right here in the box.
Do they pull it off? Well, the first time I checked my watch 55 minutes had gone and they’d just flown by so it has few problems holding your interest.
The cinematographer is the same man who shot A Single Man so the inside of a box has rarely looked so good. The young Spanish director allows himself a few non realistic shots and it has to be said that it does seem to a uniquely spacious coffin, you never really share his claustrophobia.
For the most part it stays honest but at the start of the third act the script tries to crank up the sense of danger with a twist involving him suddenly discovering something in his pocket and it’s too much of a movie moment, it weakens your faith in the film.
The film’s most contentious choice is to be an Iraq film. The man is a civilian contractor, a truck driver whose convoy was attacked by insurgents.
The Iraq setting is jarring, only partly because the film is quite heavy handed with its political point making. A man in a box is an everyman and a nobody, a man without context and an audience can identify with his dilemma as some kind of fiendish, rather warped, Roald Dahl style tale. When a current affairs context is supplied, when he becomes a small part of a larger horror, it sucks a lot of the fun out of it. It turns it into The Hurt Coffin.
While I was impressed by the movie, I was never particularly gripped by it and I never really cared if Ryan Reynolds got out or not. Nothing against him or his performance it’s just that I think the film suffers from an intensified level of the dilemma that any “realistic” horror movie/ chillers has to deal with. Audience instinctively side with a credible protagonist in a believable dilemma. They pull for them to survive, but simultaneously they feel a bit betrayed if they do, like the film makers are treating them like children. So once they’ve put him in the box, they really have no way out.
