In this 2010 thriller, terrorists do to Ryan Reynolds what anyone who has seen Green Lantern wishes they could: bury him alive in the desert.

Hollywood has long been obsessed with setting high-concept thrillers in ever-smaller spaces, from Hitchcock classics like Lifeboat and Rope, to modern genre flicks Phone Booth and The Call, in which a girl is trapped in the boot of a car.

Buried takes the challenge to new depths by taking place entirely in a coffin. Reynolds plays a truck driver with the inarguably truck driver name of Paul Conroy (it might as well have been Haul Convoy), who gets attacked in Iraq and wakes up to find he has generously been buried with a lighter and a cell phone that has enough signal to make international calls, in order for a film to occur.

Unfolding through a series of unlikely phone calls, the far-fetched story is thin on the ground, and fails to muster much sympathy for our buried lead. Paul says he “didn’t know it was going to be like this over here,” here being an active warzone. The movie expects us to root for Paul by virtue of his being a blue-collar American, but he and Reynolds’ screen presence are so unlikeable that you don’t really care about his being (or possibly becoming) salt of the earth.

To Reynolds’ credit he is alone on screen throughout, so for once he has nowhere to hide as an actor. And like Gwyneth Paltrow in Se7en, being in a box brings out one of his best performances, even if he is ultimately upstaged by a wooden crate.

Rodrigo Cortés directs the hell out of the coffin, ingeniously set up to film from inconceivable angles. As though making up for the two-dimensional nature of the story and protagonist, the resourceful Spanish director explores every shot and space of the box, sticking to the most self-contained of parameters while keeping it visually interesting and surprisingly dynamic for 90 claustrophobic minutes.

It also mounts a decent critique of the Iraq war and corporate America, though the political hostage elements would soon be surpassed by Danish thriller A Hijacking, and the alone-with-a-phone conceit by Tom Hardy vehicle Locke.

At its best, Buried successfully taps into that most harrowing of fears; not so much being buried alive as being stuck on the phone to unhelpful, bureaucratic organisations. The annoying answer phone messages and infuriating hold music give the movie an ironic familiarity, but these glimpses of wit are buried in a subterranean story with even lower stakes.