Buried
2010’s Buried is one of those films that gives me extreme anxiety, not only because it’s just an hour and a half of Ryan Reynolds in a pine box, but also because the ending suggests just how small and insignificant you are in the grand scheme of things. Reynolds’ Paul Conroy doesn’t survive his ordeal, which in itself is sad. But Rodrigo Cortes’ tight, claustrophobic directing of the film, and the fact that Paul only has a cellphone and disembodied voices from that cell phone as a connection to the outside allows us to feel like we are buried alive with Paul. Paul talks to Dan Brenner, the head of the Hostage Working Group, who assures Paul (and us) that they are doing everything they can to find him. This hope lasts all the way up to the very last seconds of the film. The end is a one-two punch in terms of devastation. 1) The coffin they were digging up wasn’t Paul’s, so therefore, Paul is going to die from suffocation as the sand fills his coffin, and 2) who they actually dig up is Mark White, a guy who Dan had said was saved three weeks before in a similar situation as Paul. Those revelations — Paul’s going to die, no one is going to find his body, and he and Mark didn’t matter enough for the American government to really try to find — is completely sobering and devastating.
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