Buried

Buried had a reported budget of US$2-3 million and grossed more than $18 million globally by the end of 2010, before its DVD release. It's a winning calling card for its Spanish director, Rodrigo Cortes, and lead actor, Ryan Reynolds. And for the concept-creating producers who arranged their association and, thereby gained official Spanish (Catalan) and Canadian credits.

A third key factor was employing Chris Sparling to write the movie, which won him the USA's National Board of Review 2010 award for best original screenplay, unintentionally encouraging other writers to take commercially offbeat scripts abroad to get them made. (But gauche Sparling committed a Hollywood faux pas when he urged Oscar voters to nominate his screenplay.)

One can imagine Hollywood bean-counters' reactions to the concept of a kidnapped 30-year-old married American lorry driver held for ransom in Iraq, buried in a coffin-sized box with few items capable of illuminating him and advancing the story.

It's obvious to an audience and the driver that time and the oxygen in the box will soon run out. The kidnapper, speaking with him via the cellphone, is ruthlessly demanding, and phone contacts with the outside world are frustrated or frustrating. Other movies have exploited claustrophobia and imminent death threats, but this one does so with perverse black humour a la Hitchcock, depicting brutal corporate and political realities unimaginable in feel-good Hollywood entertainment.

Frequent lapses into total blackness, during which audiences only hear Reynold's curses, sobs, snores and coughs, intensify the dramatic intensity of this portrayal of a condemned man's emotions. The movie never leaves the box setting throughout its 90 minutes of life-maintaining air. On a DVD, this can become tedious rather than riveting, and I can imagine the movie is even more effective on the big screen, shared with other spectators "trapped" in their cinema seats, not knowing if the man can be rescued.

Sparling, previously known only for writing and acting in shorts and a home-made comedy, crafted a screenplay with a cunning blend of suspenseful tricks. The super-cynical sting in the story's tale is reason enough for Sparling's award. First-time feature director Cortes also edited the images with mature stylishness, and the cinematography by another relative newcomer, Eduard Grau, shows why Ford chose the young Barcelona man as his directory of photography for A Solitary Man.

There were few slips in the scenario's logical flow. Only one trick was a little too convenient to be credible. The kidnapper had provided the driver with a Zippo lighter and a Blackberry at the start, which made sense from his point of view. After 40 minutes, though when those two spasmodic sources of light stopped providing interesting angles and shadows, the driver discovers a bag containing glow-sticks and a torchlight (red or white light), plus a sharp penknife that enables two further plot developments.

They all work out acceptably, though, in the ever-increasing tempo of fear and despair. Adding mildly horroric tension are low-key mood-setting music, a fanged sand snake slithering into the box, and an overhead bombing that leads to broken timber planks in the box's roof and periodic trickles of sand.

Abjuring flashbacks, and only including one short, relevant phone video from the outside world, the movie stays in the confines of the box the whole time. Voices off - for mechanical phone operators, the vengeful anti-invasion kidnapper, the truck company's legalistic personnel department, and the official hostage-rescue team's professionally friendly liaison officer - are disembodied images of bureaucracy, spin and indifference. Through them, the morals of the story are explained.

Vancouver-born Ryan Reynolds grabbed this chance to prove his acting ability. A teenage Nickleodeon TV series performer who later got a few parts in Hollywood, Reynolds was better known as the fiance (for two years, 2004-6) of fellow-Canadian singer (and Nickleodeon artiste) Alanis Morisette, then as the husband for two years (2008-10) of actress Scarlett Johansson. He (and his movie stand-in) can now sleep better at night, unless he dreams about the time he spent making this breakthrough movie.