Buried

A man wakes up, in pitch darkness. We hear him shuffle about, and we hear him banging against wood. He begins to panic and hyperventilate. Eventually, he finds he has a zippo lighter, which he lights. We see that the man, Ryan Reynolds, is in a rough wooden coffin sized crate, which, from the odd bit of sand falling through the cracks in the roof, has apparently been buried. At this point, he quite reasonably begins to totally freak out. 

Once he regains some kind of composure, her begins to take stock, and eventually finds (after it begins ringing) that he's got a mobile in there with him. After a few panicky calls to people, and getting a lot of answering machines and unhelpful voice menus, he finally realises he should call back the person who called him; at which point he learns he's been buried buy Iraqi insurgents, and if he doesn't arrange for five million dollars to be paid by 9pm, he'd going to be left there to die. This is a problem, as he is but a simple truck driver, who nobody's ever going to break the "no negotiating with terrorists" thing over. 

Eventually, he gets through to the authorities, who assure him they're doing everything they can to help, which he doubts. He also has to contend with such fun stuff as a snaked burrowing in there with him, the increasingly unreasonable demnads of his kidnappers, and of course his own dwindling ability to keep it together. It's frustrating, in that I'm sure you could think of a load of things that he could have done to maximise his chances, but realistically, it's quite reasonable that he'd be able to do very little of it, given his mental state, and the fact he's not that bright in the first place. 

As a film, it's a very interesting experiment. It's in near real time, and is wholly set in the coffin. If you're worried that this might make it a bit samey and repetitious over two and a half hours, you wouldn't be far wrong. At 95 minutes, it's just too long for the content. But on the other hand, this is a film that's made the audacious move of setting an entire film in a 3ftx3ftx6ft box, and the fact that they did it at all is a technical marvel. It is, also, quite unbelievably tense by the end. If this were a 60 minute play, it would be pared down to its basics and better for it. But even without that, it's still one fo the most interesting and inventive films out this year. And as for Ryan Reynolds - this is a very different film to his usual sarky light comedy stuff, and he does well to hold our attention for an hour and a half. Very impressive dramatic turn for him, and I hope it goes on to net him more of this kind of role, and fewer weak romantic comedies.