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Buried

8/10

Stars: Ryan Reynolds. Voices: Robert Paterson, Stephen Tobolowsky, José Luis Garcia Perez, Samantha Mathis, Mary Songbird, Cade Dundish, Ivana Miño

Director: Rodrigo Cortés

This may be a classic of its kind, though it's not a field in which you'd want to see an awful lot of entries. Truck driver Paul Conroy (Reynolds), working in the Iraq of 2006, wakes to find himself in a crude wooden coffin below ground.

As he accustoms himself to his confined surroundings and desperate plight, he finds a number of things in the coffin with him. A mysterious cellphone that isn't his; a torch; a knife. He has also been left his lighter and the pills he takes for anxiety attacks.

He begins trying to get in touch with people; his wife isn't at home, He also contacts his firm who, fearful of insurance claims, respond by dismissing him for an alleged affair with a co-worker, whom he subsequently sees on a video sent by phone to him by his captors, who use the device to demand a million dollar ransom. And, in the film's best scene, there's a snake...

Director Cortés keeps this going pretty well considering the limitations of the situation, and Reynolds does all that he can as the man whose desperation is all too obvious as his time runs out like the sand that begins seeping through the lid of the coffin. The story does contain an outrageous 'cheat' towards the end, but otherwise Chris Sparling's screenplay is right on target, as you sweat right along with the captive Conroy.

David Quinlan

Spain 2009. UK Distributor: Icon. Colour by Image Film Lab.
95 minutes. Not widescreen. UK certificate: 15.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 0, Violence/Horror 1, Drugs 0, Swearing 3.

Review date: 26 Sep 2010