First Look: Ryan Reynolds In Buried

I'm fascinated by the in-production indie Buried, starring Ryan Reynolds, as evidenced by the fact that I keep writing about it. Now Twitch presents a pair of stills from the film showing a bit of what we can expect to see when Reynolds wakes up buried alive in a shallow grave in Iraq.

Buried is an adventurous project based on a script by Chris Sparling, directed by Rodrigo Cortes. And, as we've heard from Reynolds already, it is a one-man show. ("...it's just me, I'm the only person in the whole movie so, I don't know, we'll see. It's either going to be, you know, the greatest, most experimental cool movie ever made or god knows what.") Reynolds plays Paul, a civilian contractor working in Iraq who wakes up in a coffin. With him is a cell phone and a lighter, and (spoilers, I guess) the script is a series of increasingly frantic conversations and entreaties as Paul attempts to use the ever-dwindling battery on the phone to reach someone who can help him out of a very terrible situation.

You can see the first image above, while the second is at Twitch. Comparing the two side by side suggests that Paul's struggle to escape from his certain doom is a painful one. And the first photo suggests that the film will be as claustrophobic as possible when trying to cram a camera into a coffin with an actor without the use of expensive effects and CGI. Actually looks like Reynolds has a bit of room to move in there; I've stayed in New York hotel rooms that felt about that size. They didn't have heat and bombs and a ticking death clock, however.

We'll keep an eye on this one as it gets closer to completion. I love the premise and the cajones it takes for an actor like Reynolds to take on something that could leave him as bare and open as this might. Let's hope it works.