Buried (Rodrigo Cortés, 2010)

In which Ryan Reynolds wakes up to find himself trapped in a coffin somewhere under the sands of Iraq. The concept is hardly new, with the claustrophobic nightmare of interment notably covered in George Sluizer's two versions of The Vanishing. But whereas in those films, their respective European arthouse and Hollywood thriller models already pointed fairly reliably to the nature of the protagonist's eventual fate, here Spanish director Cortés has cleverly cast a Hollywood A-lister in the role and, with that dichotomy, all bets are off from the outset.
The script does of course get constrained by a lack of room to manoeuvre a great deal, with Reynolds's character dutifully going through the five stages of grief. But there's a gratifyingly mordant political wit at work in his increasingly desperate mobile phone pleadings with blandly officious and uncomprehending American governmental bodies and call centre operatives, and the filmmakers' ingenuity coping with the technical demands placed on them by the brief makes Buried a riveting exercise to follow.

7/10