Oxygen: Director Alexandre Aja’s Latest Offers Shallow Suspenseful Breaths

By Thom Ernst

Rating: B

I can’t say that Oxygen comes as a breath of fresh air, but I cannot pass it off as a yawn. Too bad because few things make a writer feel more accomplished than a suitable allusion linking the film to critique. But while Oxygen is not great, it’s not bad either.

It’s a sigh.

The appeal going into Oxygen is its director, Alexandre Aja. Aja won the affections of genre fans years ago with a nasty bit of work called Haute Tension (1999). I saw Haute Tension (High Tension) on a private screen in the TIFF offices (Toronto International Film Festival).

In it, a projectionist happens by and is caught off-guard by a particularly gruesome scene. The projectionist, who I assume has seen plenty in his years working film festivals, becomes outraged and falls into a rant about the irresponsibility of filmmakers who put “trash” (his words) into the world. I nodded, but I knew I was hooked.

Since then, Aja’s films have grown softer, as if he heard and was injured by the projectionist’s words. (An exception is his follow-up film in 2006, a surprisingly effective remake of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes).

Aja either leans too far into the joke—Pirahanna 3D (2010) and Horns (2013) are merely live-action cartoons—or adheres too earnestly into an implied social commentary: The 9th Life of Louis Drax (2016). And though he got some of his game back with Crawl (2019), a genuinely decent creature feature involving flash floods and hungry gators, it’s still far removed from Aja’s auspicious beginnings.

With Oxygen, Aja scales down more than just horror and violence. He constructs a suspense thriller with a cast (essentially) of one in a bit of cinema trickery. There are more characters than one in the film, but they exist as disembodied voices or glimpsed briefly in flashbacks. Malik Zidi appears in an unspeaking role as Léo Ferguson.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Aja, who is French, casts French actress Mélanie Laurent (a role first offered to Anne Hathaway then Noomi Rapace) as a woman who wakes up wrapped in a cocoon-like membrane, strapped and encased in a cryogenic chamber. '

But before you can holler rebirth and resurrection, she breaks through the cocoon as an innocent freshly born into a world she knows nothing about. She has no idea of who she is, where she is, or how she got there. All she knows is that she’s trapped, and she’s running low on oxygen.

The woman (she has a name, but in the interest of leaving all mysteries intact, I will continue to identify her as ‘the woman’) quickly befriends an officious-sounding computer named M.I.L.O. ( a 2021 version of HAL) who comically keeps offering sedatives and tries to administrate ‘charitable euthanasia’ whenever it deems the odds of survival are too low to consider.

The script from first-time screenwriter Christy LeBlanc works on a building-block structure where the answer to one question unveils a more profound question. As the woman unravels her identity and scrambles to make sense of her intermittent flashes of memory, she discovers a more dangerous reality than the one she initially imagined.

It’s easy to envision how this film might have been pitched. It’s a mash-up of Buried (2010) meets Gravity (2013). Of the two films, Oxygen has more in common with Buried than it does with Gravity despite their shared science fiction label.

Laurent’s performance is confined to the coffin-like chamber. She does excellent work acting with her eyes and facial expressions. But this is a French-language film that Netflix airs dubbed to English. The dubbing is a distraction that undermines Laurent’s efforts and robs the movie of much of its intensity and some of its integrity.

Still, the movie engages as a mystery with a countdown element that effectively raises the stakes to nail-biting anxiety.

It all works to a conclusion that, if little else, provides satisfactory answers to its questions. And Oxygen is unlikely to offend anyone’s sensibilities, let alone that of the ranting projectionist who long ago had the misfortune to walk in when Aja was bursting onto the scene.

CLICK HERE to watch Bonnie Laufer’s Q&A with Oxygen director Alexandre Aja.

Oxygen. Directed by Alexandre Aja. Starring Mélanie Laurent and Malik Zidi. Available now on Netflix.