Sin #83: Coffin Nightmares

Remember that scene in “Kill Bill Volume 2” where the bride is tied up and about to be buried alive? Tarantino brilliantly changes screen formats to give us a sense of claustrophobia and dread and then turns the screen to dark as we hear the rumbling of the dirt and the bride’s hard breathing (Tarantino also used the premise of being buried alive for his great feature-length episode of “CSI”).

Rodrigo Cortés’s “Buried” takes it to next level by making a 90-minute movie set entirely inside a coffin and featuring only one actor on-screen, without cutting to flashbacks. Although “Buried” can be seen as a “gimmick movie” (one actor, one stage), it is so tense that it absorbs us completely. The film wouldn’t be effective without a believable central character and Ryan Reynolds is more than up to the task and creates a powerful performance that draws us into his startling predicament (which could be described as a cross between the literary nightmares created by Edgar Allan Poe and the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock).

The movie is diabolically ingenious in its narrative devices; all Paul Conroy (Reynolds) has is a cell phone with half a battery, a Zippo lighter, some fluorescent lights and a pen. His captor wants him to film himself and ask for a 5 million dollar ransom. But the thing about Paul is that he is not a soldier or any kind of action hero whatsoever; he is merely a truck driver in Iraq moving supplies, working on hostile territory for a low income to provide for his family.

In a situation like this, who would we call? Our family, friends, government agencies, maybe our captor begging to let us out? Paul desperately tries to call everybody he can to let them know he is trapped underground. In one of the most grueling moments in the film he receives a call from the head of the company he works for, informing him of his termination.

Cortés shows great imagination with his cinematography and editing (he is actually his own editor, which is uncommon). Although most of the movie is shot in very intense close-ups (showing Reynolds looking bloody and grimy), there are also strange angles that show the dirt around the coffin. The movie is also wise in giving Paul a background based solely on his conversations on the phone; this gives us a completely subjective view as to the events on the other lines making us wonder, as Paul does, if they’re entirely trustworthy.

There are a lot of twists in “Buried”, including its rather ironic ending (which will be definitely a subject of conversation coming out of the theater) but the movie never takes to the usual Hollywood conventions (if a big studio had made it there would be scenes with the grieving wife and son and desperate military strategies to try to rescue him).

Here is a film hard to recommend. Yes, it’s incredibly effective in its depiction of desperation on an impossible situation but it’s more of an endurance test for audiences than an entertainment. Still it’s a virtuoso example of what can be done with the simplest resources. With it, we can also agree that being buried alive is one of the most frightening of scenarios imaginable.