Buried - Blu-ray Review

'Buried has all the problems most single-location films have, amplified ten times. Or should that be 'constricted ten times'?'

There's no real way to better review Buried than to tell you what you already know: it's a ninety-five minute film about a man, in a box. If that sounds intriguing to you - or, more pertinently, if watching Rodrigo Cortés try to make this premise work sounds intriguing to you - then you'll probably get something out of it. If it doesn't, you won't.

The reason why you won't is because Buried has all the problems most single-location films have, amplified ten times. Or should that be 'constricted ten times'? Who knows. Either way, putting one guy in one location for that amount of time and changing only the camera angles, lighting and voices on the other end of the phone is going to have its problems. Cortés, for example, struggles with variety. By the time the third or fourth person Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) has tried to call has turned out not to be near their phone, the frustration of getting someone's answer machine has been proven and worn out. Conroy's trips between quiet acceptance, rage and panic are understandable but, again, by the time they're repeated multiple times they start to become wearisome.

The decision by Cortés to use music is a key one. By using gradually heightening dulcet tones (albeit subtle ones) at moments of high tension the director seems to accept that by 'just' showing the coffin, he can't quite produce the necessary emotional response. Cortés needs something which is non-naturalistic to emphasise the tension and by that very decision he treads a thin line between compromising the film-making choices he makes elsewhere and heightening the audience's response to Conroy's plight.

That said, the emotional payoff of Buried (late though it comes) is significant and laced with evidence that Cortés has managed to get you to feel something for the majority of the film's runtime. Reynolds and/or screenwriter Chris Sparling can't resist a wry piece of humour every so often but otherwise this is as intense as the Canadian actor has ever been and he does a good job of making Conroy out to be both sympathetic and fallible. The voices on the other end of the phone do less well and are alternatively weak, forgettable, un-needed or anonymous. Not that that really matters: Buried is all about Reynolds and in a demanding situation he performs very well.

Everything about Buried comes back to Cortés' main artistic decision, which is a brave one but ultimately one that some will find hard to justify. Would the film really lose anything by making the trip outside of the box just once or twice? Could it have been more captivating if the time was split 50/50? It smacks of dedicated philosophical experiment rather than a decision based on what audiences will find most enjoyable or what elements would develop the narrative to a more satisfactory degree and for that reason Buried goes down as a film which could have been significantly better. Cortés' bravery and dedication to his idea are laudable but even if his execution of it is perfect the very nature of the idea produces a film which is nowhere near as thrilling as it desperately wants to be.

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