The concept of Kammerspiel is a familiar one. Many directors have used it, often to great effect. Buried takes the concept to its conceptual limits: the entire movie takes place in a space of 2,3x1x1 meters. What makes this film fascinating to watch is to a great extent connected with its limited space. As a political thriller, it is a little bit too thin to make an impression. As a character study - well, it's not about that.
Paul wakes up in darkness. He finds himself lying in a wooden coffin, with a mobile phone and a lighter. Paul is a civilian contractor working in Iraq. He was taken hostage while driving a truck in a convoy. With the mobile phone, Paul tries to reach the outside world. This is the most fascinating part of the story, the total reliance of the film on technology. Other characters are mediated by a telephone line. The mobile phone suddenly turns into a possibility of survival, but from other perspectives, a political threat (Paul is asked to record a video of himself in the coffin - American authorities desperately try to prevent that scenario from happening). In the film, the mobile phone occupies the role of THE outside world and that is something that one can, if one wants, read stuff into.
Buried could have been a much better film had it not relied to such a great extent on traditional elements of the thriller genre; the director should have trusted the core themes more, that they are interesting enough, that the viewer do not need dramatic moments of "what will happen next".
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