11) Buried
A ‘psychological thriller’ that takes place entirely inside a coffin, Buried features Ryan Reynolds as Paul Conroy – a US truck driver working in Iraq, whose convoy was ambushed. Thrust into the action from the first frame, we become aware of Conroy’s predicament along with him, which immediately creates barely tolerable tension. We quickly discover that he has with him a lighter, flask, flashlight, knife, glow sticks, pen, and mobile phone – on which he receives a phone call from his kidnapper, demanding a ransom of $5 million. The remaining 90 minutes of the film follow a range of communications between Conroy and various key figures outside, as he tries to orchestrate his own rescue.
Written by Chris Sparling, and directed by Rodrigo Cortes, Buried is a technical achievement of staggering proportions. It demonstrates exactly how to create nerve-jangling action scenes – with a phone – without ever leaving a box. It is simply the sound that we hear along with Conroy, and the reactions expressed on his dimly lit face that leave us to fill in the blanks with our own imagination – just as the trapped character is doing. Conroy runs the gamut of extreme emotions from confusion to anger, to panic, to desperation and grief. There’s shock at the sudden realisation of his situation, followed by slow-burn horror as the implications become clear.
Though it is essentially a ‘real time’ movie, it zips by, feeling much quicker than its actually running time – and we are as breathless by the end of it as Conroy himself. Ironically, despite it being the best performance of Ryan Reynolds’ career, it is that which makes this film such a traumatic experience for the audience. With physical movement greatly restricted, he conveys everything in his tone of voice. The result is that we feel what he feels – right down to the final, devastating reel. While that is an astonishing thing to behold, you won’t want to do it more than once.
12) Enter the Void
Dying is the ultimate trip. Or at least it is in Enter the Void, a living, breathing hallucinogen from Argentinian filmmaker Gaspar Noe. It’s one big, dizzying, intoxicating sensory experience, an orgy of psychadelic, neon-colored sights, thumping sounds and resonating emotions.
Swirling through a narrative about drugs, bad choices, and reincarnation, Noe moves his camera through the landscape of Tokyo, allowing it to zoom over rooftops as if every building was a set. It’s not an easy watch, but a polarizing experimental head trip that pulls euphoria and emotions of grief and despair out of viewers as if he or she were living it.
Enter the Void will either blow your mind or give you a seizure, but you’ve never seen anything like it before and you probably never will.