You're an American civilian contractor ambushed in Iraq and buried in a coffin. About your person, you have a Zippo lighter, a pocket knife, a cell phone that's miraculously still receiving signal underground and (slight spoiler) a giant snake that you won't notice is coiled around your leg for the best part of a goddamn hour. What do you do next?
And so begins Paul Conroy's nightmare. He's played by dreamy actor Ryan Reynolds, who's on-screen, and in the box, for the entirety of Buried's 94-minute runtime.
The first big problem with the film is that, because you never see him when he's not in the box, you struggle to care about the life he's left behind outside of his prison. Despite the apparent horridness of Conroy's current predicament, it's all just a bit 'scared man is scared'.
The second problem is that it's nonsense. Conroy spends an excessive amount of time being put on hold by various government agencies, who seem pretty keen on letting him asphyxiate and die alone rather than have to endure the ball-ache of actually going to rescue him when a simple call to any national newspaper would get him worldwide attention.
No doubt the director of Buried thinks it's a clever allegory for the predicament of America in Iraq. It's not. It's faux artsy torture porn for idiots. Tense? Try boring. It was boring, like being trapped in a box with a man who's stuck on hold.
And in case you think we're exaggerating and being too harsh, try another two moments of sheer stupid on for size. (More spoilers coming, by the way.) To deal with the whole snake situation, Conroy tries to light a fire in the coffin. Repeat: a fire in the coffin.
Then, in a bid to out-dumb itself, a human resources man from Conroy's company calls to sack him towards the end of the film. At that point, the only thing left to do is bury the Blu-ray. On the Moon.
I'm gonna disagree with you on this but then again, my intense claustrophobia might be part of why I found it so interesting. Despite taking place almost entirely in a box, this is one of the most terrifying films of all time in my book. Very nicely done film IMO.