Film Review: Buried

Buried. Rated MA15+. 95 minutes. Directed by Rodrigo Cortés. Screenplay by Chris Sparling.

Like The Premature Burial (1962) and The Vanishing (1988), Spanish-born Cortés (The Contestant) plays with one the horror genre’s greatest trump cards: being buried alive. What he also does, courtesy of an punishing, rock ‘n’ roll screenplay from Mr Sparling, is shine a spotlight on the subject of foreigners being taken hostage in Iraq – and the desperate efforts by the US Department of State’s Hostage Working Group to free them.

Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) is a US contractor working as a truck driver in Iraq. When his convoy is attacked by insurgents, he wakes to find himself buried alive in a crate with a mobile telephone, a cigarette lighter, a torch, a hip-flask, a pen and flick-knife.

Depending entirely on how impressed you are by the concept of a film shot entirely in a wooden crate starring only one actor, Buried may possibly elicit one response: ‘an actor in a box with some props – so what?’. But Sparling’s screenplay, Cortés’s rivetting direction and editing, Reynolds’s dazzling star turn and Eduard Grau’s (A Single Man) cinematography, all combine brilliantly to ensure that Buried is rarely less than an entirely engrossing experience.

Conroy’s only contact with the outside world is through the mobile phone, with Robert Paterson as Hostage Working Group representative ‘Dan Brenner’, in particular, providing excellent support to Reynolds’ desperate and ill-fated victim of circumstance.

Peversely, the day after I saw this film, the UK’s The Guardian newspaper reported that aid-worker Linda Norgrove – a 36-year-old British hostage being held in Afghanistan – was killed as Nato troops were trying to rescue her. What, only the night before, had been a marvellously escapist, cinematic tour de force, suddenly became a compelling ‘anti-war film’ – a powerful statement about the horrific possibilities that confront civilians working in conflict-stricken war zones. Hostage-taking, either to influence the outcomes for countries that send in their armed forces or companies that send in their workers, remains a potent consequence of both criminally- and politically-motivated opportunism.

The review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group.