"Buried" Trailer Analysis

When you watch this trailer the whole way through, it seems kind of ambiguous. On the one hand it seems exciting as you have no idea why he's in a coffin, what's going to happen to him and where the film is going to go. But on the other hand, it literally just does show him in a coffin leading you to think maybe this film hasn't got much going for it at all. But when you take a closer look at the way this trailer has been put together, it builds the film up just the right amount to make you intrigued enough to go and see it, without the feeling of being let down too much, as the action shown is minimal.

When the trailer first starts, it's a blank screen. Typical of this sort of genre as when you're watching black your mind begins to wonder. You're not taking in anything else other than the noise. And the noise here is an intense beat, forcing you to become anxious immediately, setting the tone of the genre. Then we hear the protagonist say "Okay, okay, okay" in a quick and frantic pace. This leads you to believe someone's in trouble, but we can't see anything so the tension begins to rise. We then hear a dialing tone and "911" after he states "pick up, pick up, pick up". You hear 911, you know there's danger.

After we discover the protagonist doesn't know where he is and that he got "hit on the head", you're now in frightened mode. Typically, you relate to the lead character. In a lot of cases, the audience know more than the characters giving them some sort of cathartic awareness leading them to feel a lot more at ease with the action, as they can imagine what's going to occur. But as the phone cuts out and the music intensifies, there's no cathartic awareness, there's just pure panic and mystery.

After 40 long seconds of no image, we see he has a lighter which illuminates the area briefly. After several attempts of the lighter lighting - A clever device on their part as the small flame will only show a small amount of space, providing an even more claustrophobic feeling that we already have, we see from a long shot his face laying down in an impacted environment which is wooden. You now know he's in a coffin. This alone is a fear in itself because nobody knows what happens once you die, so a coffin is a very enigmatic object causing your mind to go into overload at the idea of it. But that's all we get. After he releases a sigh of relief and almost pain, the screen fades out and ominous music begins to play as the title "Buried" slowly fades onto the screen.

So from the clues given, he's trapped in a coffin buried underground. We know nothing about what would happened or what could happen. We're not even sure of the lead actor as there are no titles introducing him, but you're probably aware that is it Ryan Reynolds. It's a brilliant trailer. You're scared enough to be moved by it, but also left wondering what you've just seen to want to go and see it.