HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Imagine waking up in the dark. The air is hot and dry. You can’t see, and it’s hard to breathe. You try to sit up and your head hits rough wood. To your left and right, on all sides, are wooden walls. You push against the boards, you scream, but no one can hear you...
So begins Lionsgate’s unprecedented film experience, Buried, a 94-minute, real-time odyssey of one man’s struggle to reach the light of day. A feat of cinematic story-telling, Buried traces the moment-to-moment terror experienced by Paul Conroy, a contract truck driver in Iraq who has been kidnapped by insurgents and buried alive for ransom, his only lifeline a cell phone with poor reception and a dying battery.
“You can’t help but wonder, ‘If I were in that situation, how would I react? Would I be calm or would I be out of my mind hysterical?’” says actor Ryan Reynolds, who stars as Conroy. “Buried is a true thriller. If Alfred Hitchcock had been given this script fifty years ago, he would have made this movie.”
Adds director Rodrigo Cortés, “The size of a story is dependent on one thing and one thing only: the story itself, whether what it tells us is interesting, whether it captures the spectator’s attention and holds it throughout, and whether it makes us want to know what’s going to happen next. In that sense Buried is a big movie.”
A suspense film in the truest sense of the word, Buried is a cinematic dare that maintains a gripping level of tension with only the bare minimum of narrative devices. It successfully incorporates elements of action filmmaking and emotional drama, while making unsettling points along the way about the Iraq war, corporate malfeasance and governmental ethics.
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