Buried

* A version of this review appears in the current issue of Uncut magazine...

Buried isn't so much a film as a dare. Its director, Spaniard Rodrigo Cortes, dares you to take on trust his ability to stretch to 95 minutes the claustrophobic story of a man trapped in a coffin six feet below the ground in war-torn Iraq. Cortes ups the ante further still by promising never to cut away from that box, or use flashbacks or split-screen, or show anything other than the confines of his hero's prison. More than that, he wants us to root for this guy, stuck so ignominiously in the ground. It's a dare because Buried is a film that really shouldn't work. But, quite astonishingly, it does.

The one-location set-up is hardly a new idea, and it has become a pet device of 21st-century low-budget filmmakers lately, in films as diverse as the first Saw and last year's sci-fi sleeper Moon. But where those films relied more on character and dialogue, Cortes's thriller has loftier ambitions, harking back to the experimental films of the ingenious Alfred Hitchcock, whose films Rope – shot in a single Manhattan apartment in a single take – and Lifeboat – shot in a boat at sea, in real time – have rarely, in the intervening half-century, quite been matched. To compare Cortes to Hitchcock may seem grand, but echoes of the master's style, and most of all his mischief, are definitely there.

And like Hitchcock at his finest, Cortes is helped to the finish line by his leading man. Ryan Reynolds is no James Stewart – he's Canadian for a start – but he does have that actor's common touch, the everyman quality that draws us straight into the scenario. And when the movie starts, in pitch-dark, inky blackness, we are right there with him, screaming, shouting, struggling, until, after what seems like it's going to become an eternity, the story kicks in. It transpires there's a mobile phone in the box, and through a series of agonising phone calls we find out who this man is. And it turns out that he's both everybody and nobody, a hapless working Joe named Paul Conroy, a private security worker, who has been kidnapped, drugged and buried. And unless the US government stumps up a rather optimistic $2 million ransom, Conroy doesn't have a hope of getting out of there.

So, will he or won't he? This is the issue Cortes manipulates the most skilfully. The film lingers too long in places, and the credit sequence is an almost comically over-extended prelude, complete with a thunderous theme that makes Cape Fear's seem jaunty by comparison. But the longueurs won't be remembered. What Cortes has created is an electrifying, almost literally airless thriller, finally delivering a shocking coup de grace that's as dark and disturbing as his uncompromising vision.