One man, one coffin, 90 minutes. That’s the premise of the purposefully constrained suspense film Buried, an exercise in cinematic minimalism that doubles as a metaphor for how grunts get manipulated and sacrificed in times of war. Buried opens with contract truck driver Ryan Reynolds lying in a sand-covered coffin in an Iraq desert. In the box with him: a lighter, a cell phone, and a few other items waiting to be discovered. Over the next hour-plus, the audience watches Reynolds make and field calls, in hopes of getting found—or of appeasing the men who kidnapped and buried him in the first place. He tries to reach his bosses, his family, the authorities… anyone to whom he can explain his situation quickly and clearly. But outside of a couple of pictures and videos that appear on the phone, Reynolds’ face is the only one onscreen, and his coffin is pretty much the only set.