BURIED Review Thread (Spoilers)

[GreenScar]

I’m fascinated by the in-production indie Buried, starring Ryan Reynolds, as evidenced by the fact that I keep writing about it. Now Twitch presents a pair of stills from the film showing a bit of what we can expect to see when Reynolds wakes up buried alive in a shallow grave in Iraq.

Buried is an adventurous project based on a script by Chris Sparling, directed by Rodrigo Cortes. And, as we’ve heard from Reynolds already, it is a one-man show. (”…it’s just me, I’m the only person in the whole movie so, I don’t know, we’ll see. It’s either going to be, you know, the greatest, most experimental cool movie ever made or god knows what.”) Reynolds plays Paul, a civilian contractor working in Iraq who wakes up in a coffin. With him is a cell phone and a lighter, and (spoilers, I guess) the script is a series of increasingly frantic conversations and entreaties as Paul attempts to use the ever-dwindling battery on the phone to reach someone who can help him out of a very terrible situation.

You can see the first image above, while the second is at Twitch. Comparing the two side by side suggests that Paul’s struggle to escape from his certain doom is a painful one. And the first photo suggests that the film will be as claustrophobic as possible when trying to cram a camera into a coffin with an actor without the use of expensive effects and CGI. Actually looks like Reynolds has a bit of room to move in there; I’ve stayed in New York hotel rooms that felt about that size. They didn’t have heat and bombs and a ticking death clock, however.

We’ll keep an eye on this one as it gets closer to completion. I love the premise and the cajones it takes for an actor like Reynolds to take on something that could leave him as bare and open as this might. Let’s hope it works.

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Sounds interesting. It's about time he gets away from Romantic Comedies all the time.

Ryan Reynolds will star in Buried, a film that pushes him well out of the studio comfort zone, according to Variety. The film is about a civilian contractor in Iraq who is kidnapped and buried alive in the desert. According to the trade he has a candle, knife and cell phone; not the sort of things typically left on the person of someone who is being buried alive, so I’m tending towards the assumption there’s more going on than just Iraq war drama.

The film will shoot in Spain under the direction of Rodrigo Cortes from a script by Chris Sparling. Reading just the bare details I can’t help but think of the amazing film The Vanishing, which remains my favorite ‘buried alive’ movie. (The 1988 original, not director George Sluizer’s own 1993 remake.) The tenusous safety of civilian warzone contractors makes for a good starting point for a thriller, too. I’d be surprised we haven’t seen more films jumping off from the contractor scenario if it weren’t for the fact that putting ‘Iraq’ in the logline of any film now seems like a surefire way to kill it at the box office. We’ll hope for better for this one. I like the idea of Reynolds stretching himself in a controlled little thriller where he really has to carry the film on more than just charm.