Buried (2010)

Ryan Reynolds wakes up in a box. Because he's typecast himself. Sorry, because he's been taken prisoner. They whys and wherefores are gradually revealed when he finds out someone left a cell phone in the coffin with him and starts calling people trying to get help.

The entire movie takes place inside that coffin. Just Reynolds alternating between freaking out, or trying not to freak out, or talking to different people on the phone, or freaking out while talking to people on the phone.

That's not a criticism of his acting in this. I think Reynolds does a pretty good job with someone who isn't sure what's happened or what he can do and just panics. Like, when he finally notices the phone, he can't remember the emergency number he was given, so he just dials 9-1-1, and gets a police department in Ohio. By the time we learn that, we know he's in Iraq, or he was the last time he was conscious. He tries his home number, his wife's cell phone, then just calls the FBI, asking for any office.

It just feels accurate that this truck driver would not think calmly or clearly. That he would yell at people when they ask him to calm down or put him on hold. You can hear the people on the other line getting annoyed by this guy berating them, but they don't know what's going on, and he can't understand why they aren't helping him. And when they're asking him to stay calm, he can't shake the feeling they're just running out the clock on him. Since we never see any of these peoples' faces, we don't know either. If he just paranoid, or is he right?

The size of the box doesn't feel consistent. Sometimes that's intentional - as in a scene where the company that hired him does a CYA conversation with him, and when it's over, we're looking down at him from what seems more like a tall wooden shaft. Sometimes I think they just didn't want every shot to be an extreme close-up on him.

But in places they use the claustrophobia effectively. One scene, he's trying to flip ends, get his head where his feet are to retrieve something. For a moment, I thought he was going to get stuck, basically crammed in cross ways, and the thought of being wedged in like that made me start to freak out a bit.