"It was snowing sideways". I can only imagine what that entails. The heavy stuff falls rapidly and devastates a ski resort via northeast California in 2021's Buried: The 1982 Alpine Meadows Avalanche. Seven people passed, one survivor emerged, PTSD eventually kicks in, the base area destroyed. In the end natural forces as a house always wins.
With honest interviews and a shrewdness from those interviewees that were there (center employees, lift operators, local denizens, local media), "Buried" is a wounding documentary that just gets more wounding as it goes along. I mean you watch the body language of the people that witnessed what went down in March of 1982 and well, the events of that famous avalanche really stick in their craws. For reals. Almost forty years later and a nudge and that throb just never goes away. "The grim work went on". Uh-huh.
Arduous accounts, unconscious gesturing, and unwounded time aside, Buried: The 1982 Alpine Meadows Avalanche cuts its time between present day stuff to emulsion-like archives to reenactments to sequences of loud music pouncing in at weird moments (rock ditties, standard and/or otherwise). Despite an opening thirty minutes that carries a certain smugness, a "young and free" turn of mind, and an overload of bed surface technobabble, "Buried" does eventually win you over. Yup, the flick's 96 minutes finally come to a close and you feel cinematically bone-weary.
I mean the docu has a certain edge to it, a certain numbing severity if you will, with the parables of death and suffering by rocks and ice being almost too intense for a younger viewer to handle (the film is not rated but I'd go with a hard "R"). Heck, in the spring Lake Tahoe wasn't all roses and sunshine. Talk about the snow squall to end all snow squalls. "Buried" is alive!
Written by Jesse Burleson
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