Movies Worth Hunting For

Never Let Me Go

Buried

Both films: ***1/2 out of ****

This year’s fall movie schedule is already on pace to be one of the finest on record, which bodes well for those still underwhelmed by a mostly recycled collection of offerings this summer. Unfortunately, with such a variety of film festival favourites and serious award-season contenders hitting theatres each week, some are bound to get lost in the shuffle.

May I focus your attention on two superb films that are slowly withering away at the box office: Mark Romanek’s poignant sci-fi romance Never Let Me Go, and Rodrigo Cortes’ chilling suspense-thriller Buried.

Mark Romanek is no stranger to crafting haunting works about people glancing back at their lives. His most revered accomplishment in his two decades of music video and commercial work is for directing the heart-wrenching video for Johnny Cash’s “Hurt,” which became the rock icon’s epitaph. In his latest film, Never Let Me Go, he achieves a work that’s just as emotionally devastating, this time covering what Time Magazine named “The Best Book of the Decade.”

The film centers on another character looking back at their younger days – except this time our central figure is barely out of school. Her name is Kathy (Carey Mulligan) and she evokes memories of her days as a young student at Hailsham Academy, her friendships with the foolish, unstable Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and the selfish, cunning Ruth (Keira Knightley), and the love triangle that jeopardized this relationship.

Classes at Hailsham are not what we’d typically find at a proper boarding school setting, but there’s a reason I’m not spilling any details as to why. Here’s a hint: Never Let Me Go is a film about experiencing real pain in a largely manufactured life.

The curt innocence of pubescent childhood is shown delicately, but there is always an underlying notion of uncertainty in the memories from Hailsham. As the characters become young adults, the ordered lifestyles and feelings of security drift away. These souls end up lost and confused. All three main actors (Knightley and Mulligan, especially) deserve acclaim for their nuanced comings-of-age.

Ishiguro, a novelist best known for The Remains of the Day, is notable for taking the sterility and grace of a proper, English novel and instilling a dreary resignation to murk up the story and frustrate the characters. Romanek stays true to Ishiguro’s insistence on order (the scenes at Hailsham are shot quite rigidly) and drains the film’s second half of warm colours to reflect the characters' woe.

You will want the conditions to improve for these tortured souls as much as the characters themselves. But be prepared: Never Let Me Go might be the saddest film of the year, a shattering depiction of love, betrayal and angst. The film packs an emotional wallop that will be hard to shake; simply, it does just what the title says.

On the other end of the spectrum is quite a different film, albeit one that’s just as gripping and grueling as Romanek’s adaptation. It’s called Buried, it's an ode to Hitchcock, and it has a simple premise: an American contractor named Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) has been sent to Iraq. After his convoy is ambushed, he blacks out and awakens in complete darkness, buried alive in a tiny coffin.

With just a Zippo and Blackberry at his disposal, Paul has to figure out how to be rescued from the containment as oxygen starts to slip away. To make this life-and-death scenario even worse, he must comply with a terrorist demand, a ransom of $5 million.

The film restricts the narration to the mere details Conroy figures out from his phone calls. As we never seep away from the coffin, we’re left with the same sense of mystery and frustration that Paul is nearly suffocated with.

Reynolds astutely fulfills an exhaustive (but never exhausting) acting exercise. The film demands Mr. Scarlett Johansson to extend his range in minimal space, and he is exceptional – going from a panicked, desperate psyche when speaking with the sources on the ground to a tender anguish as he tries to reach the family he may never see again. The film could have been tough to stomach had Reynolds’ layered performance not supplied some much needed air.

Director Rodrigo Cortes also pulls off a stunning number of inventive camera angles – the most impressive cinematography of any film this year. He makes the space seem wider in one moment and then even tighter in the next, and uses various tricks to help the audience adapt to the space. Cortes expertly uses a limited set of light as well, able to emit a glow large enough to show what is going on, while leaving the rest of the atmosphere engulfed in darkness.

Suspense-thrillers rarely think outside the box anymore, but Buried is one that keeps its audience mesmerized without going further than inside one. It’s an intense and palpably exciting hour-and-a-half that introduces us to one new talent (Cortes) while introducing us to the range that a semi-new talent can possess when given the right circumstances (Reynolds).