Oxygen

Grade: B+

Oxygen – a new film that dropped on Netflix two days ago – is a movie that will keep you quiet for a good few minutes after you see it. I can’t imagine anybody breaking it up into installments. You will likely want to devour it in one sitting. It is an excellently filmed thriller, and the kind of movie that would make a critic boost his grade based on the surprising developments of the last few minutes, after spending most of it thinking he knew where it was inevitably going.

Oxygen, filmed in July 2020, is directed by Alexandre Aja and stars French actress Melanie Laurent, who was so striking, invaluable, and memorable in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. The folks who vote on movie awards tend to have fickle memories, and Oxygen might have unfortunately come out too early in the year to still be on any of their radars 6 months from now, but I would certainly nominate this for some technical awards, and Laurent’s performance, which might be the most unflinchingly courageous of the year. She wakes up in a fancy but claustrophobic cryogenic chamber. This is essentially a one-person movie, and all of it takes place in the chamber, except for some flashbacks. She has no recollection of how she got there, and her oxygen level (which is at 33% at the start of the film) is running out. She is able to communicate with an automated HAL-like robot named MILO, who obviously has no emotion, but can provide information, and the movie has a fun through-line where she has to think resourcefully and phrase her questions to MILO in the precise way to maximize the info she gets – or even get an answer at all.

My Netflix defaulted to English dubbing. I strongly recommend changing your options to the original French audio with subtitles of your choice, if you need them. You miss out on so much of the essence of the performances and the atmosphere if you listen to other people speak for the actors on the screen.

It’s impossible not to compare Oxygen to Buried – a film from 2010 that starred Ryan Reynolds as a man who wakes up in a coffin underground. They are very similar, but not the same movie. I will leave you to discover why she’s there, where she is, who put her there, and who she is for that matter. The film has more up its sleeve for us in its thrilling final act. There are moments of pure tension, including ones involving needles. She sticks herself in the palm of her hand a few times to help jog memories from her life, and the bit where she has to reinsert all of her IVs to their original places had me squirming and covering my mouth.

I’ve had time to sleep on it and think about the last few shots. My first gut instinct is to accept the last scene at face value and assume it’s real. But maybe not? Could it be a dream/hallucination? If Oxygen taught us one thing, it’s that our thoughts might be who we are and all we are.

Grade: B+