Directed by Alexandre Aja
Written by Christie LeBlanc
Starring Mélanie Laurent, Mathieu Amalric, Malik Zidi
Runtime: 1 hour 40 minutes
Language: French
Streaming on Netflix May 12

by Audrey Callerstrom, Staff Writer

Between his 2019 alligator/hurricane thriller Crawl and the gleefully gory Piranha 3D, French director Alexandre Aja has a knack for making an entertaining, modern B-movie. With Crawl, he combined the threat of a hurricane–already a premise for a good disaster film–with alligators. In 2010, he capitalized on the 3D fad and remade the 1978 horror film Piranha, with more than twice the original film’s gore (and budget). Piranha 3D included a nude underwater ballet, a Richard Dreyfuss cameo, and a hyper performance from Jerry O’Connell as a Girls Gone Wild-type director. Oh, and prehistoric man-eating fishies.

Which is why it’s surprising, though not unwelcome, that Aja has gone in a completely new direction with Oxygen, now playing on Netflix. Oxygen is a quiet, sci-fi film that’s slow when it should be a nail biter. As Oxygen opens, a woman (Mèlanie Laurent, an accomplished filmmaker in her own right) is breaking through a thin, fiber cocoon and gasping for air. She’s in a cryogenic pod, with no memory of how she got there, where she is, or who she is. The last thing she remembers is that she was rushed to a hospital. Is she the victim of a sadistic hospital scheme? The pod is operated by a voice system named MILO (Mathieu Amalric) which can call police and show social media information at the woman’s command, but cannot give her any clues as to why she’s in the pod. To MILO, the woman is simply a “bioform” named “Omicron 267.” To not reveal any spoilers, I will refer to Laurent’s character throughout as “267” (mostly because it sounds cool). As 267 tries to find answers, the oxygen in the pod is depleting rapidly.                 

Although things start to get interesting around the one hour mark, when the nature of the pod and 267’s identity is revealed, Aja doesn’t do well within the confined space. He sticks to the same angles: 267’s face from above, set against the blue lights of the pod; 267 from the side, showing her full body, and 267 looking at her toes. Filming an entire film within a small space can be done, and it can be suspenseful. Take Buried, for example, a film where a man (Ryan Reynolds) awakes to find he has been buried alive. There, the suspense was largely created by what was happening outside of the coffin, through phone calls, and by adding elements like a snake. Here, there’s a loss of that tense, “counting down the clock” feeling. It’s hard to pinpoint if this is a flaw in the film’s execution (it’s hard to be invested when we don’t know anything about 267) or if more inventive camerawork, or perhaps better music, would have helped speed these things along. As-is, at times, it feels like a film about a woman lying down for 90 minutes.

Oxygen also falls to certain sci-fi tropes. Although her memory is foggy, 267 remembers things about her life, shown in generic visuals. A girl in a dress running through flowers. A mother standing in a field. 267 lying in bed in the early morning, looking over at her lover (Malik Zidi). Laurent shines through, particularly when she’s able to get a hold of her mom on the phone. But even though the emotions increase in intensity, Aja opts to zoom out from Laurent’s face, rather than stay in for a tight shot. The way that Oxygen reveals the identity of 267 and why she’s in a pod is done slowly and steadily, and the film builds toward a satisfying conclusion, but it’s hard to compensate for the film’s first hour, which quickly feels repetitive.