PLOT: A cryogenic chamber malfunctions and awakens the woman inside. With oxygen levels dangerously low, she must figure a way out before it’s too late.
LOWDOWN: Alexandre Aja is a criminally underrated director. Coming right out of the gate with the left hook to the face by the name of High Tension, then following it up with one of the best remakes of the twenty-first century, The Hills Have Eyes, I’m constantly dumbfounded why folks don’t embrace him more. Don’t even get me started on why the fun summer flick Crawl isn’t a midnight movie staple yet, but I digress. With his new flick Oxygen (WATCH IT HERE) debuting exclusively on Netflix, how does it hold up among the rest of his filmography? And where does this rank against other Netflix originals? For Aja and Netflix, it is one of their best.
Oxygen follows Elizabeth Hansen (Mélanie Laurent), who awakes inside a cryogenic chamber with depleting oxygen and no memory of how or why she is there. As a movie set entirely in one cramped location, besides a few brief flashbacks, it’s hard to go into great detail. This is a journey of emotion and what we learn along the way needs to be experienced and not overly detailed here. But I’m always up for a challenge, so I’ll do my best to keep spoilers to a minimum.
Mélanie Laurent caught my attention with her badass performance in Inglourious Basterds, but Oxygen is her show and her show alone! The level of talent needed to keep the audience engaged in a tiny setting while cycling through the range of emotions one would go through in a situation like this is damn near an Olympic task. Lucky for us, Mélanie Laurent gives us a career-best performance and nails the primal fear and the human spirit all in around ninety minutes. As Elizabeth struggled to breathe, I caught myself just as stressed, and it kept me breathless. The entire movie takes place inside a pod, so every shot is close and tight, which means Laurent couldn’t slack off and had to emote in a way where you were always a part of her “high tension” (see what I did there?)
As Elizabeth tries to gather information, we get some quick nonlinear flashes of her life and slowly piece together what exactly is going on. Oxygen presents our protagonist as sort of an unreliable narrator, and more may be going on beyond what we know. To keep the entire story from being dialogue-free or awkwardly shoehorning in Elizabeth talking out loud to herself, we are introduced to the cryo chambers A.I. interface, M.I.L.O. This system has no emotion and can’t answer anything not programmed in conjunction with the chamber or accessible via the World Wide Web. Still, it does give Elizabeth a way to troubleshoot and explore her options as she tries to solve the mystery of why she’s here and how to escape before it’s too late.
With such a cramped and limited set to shoot with, Aja finds every way to show Elizabeth’s struggle. He gives Oxygen his intrinsic and personal style through intense closeups, shallow depth of field, and fluid camera movements. Hats off to the cinematographer Maxime Alexandre for once again bringing his A-game here. The lighting and colors are once again perfect, with M.I.L.O. illuminating a calming yet cold blue around Elizabeth. Aja keeps the single setting engaging and finds artistic ways to keep it from becoming stale. Never once did I become bored.
If there is any downside, it’s that Oxygen has the habit of giving some crucial information through exposition drops. There aren’t many ways around it as there is only a single character, but on a few occasions, it becomes slightly clunky and can feel a bit forced.
GORE: Oxygen is a near blood-free Aja flick.
BOTTOM LINE: This is a personal story that’s set around a single character blended perfectly within the genre of science fiction. I didn’t expect it to tug at my drunken core the way it did but bravo, gents. Bravo. A thrilling yet heartfelt tale, Oxygen is bold and beautiful. This should put Alexandre Aja on the map in terms of a bigger output. Not only can he entertain with a fun alligator flick like Crawl (even if Florida doesn’t have basement-like crawl spaces), but can also dial it down and dig deep into an emotional core. Oxygen is a dramatic thriller that, at its heart, is about the human experience and what it means to live life. Aja brings his distinct visual style to a more intimate tale and nails it.
Oxygen Releases on Netflix on May 12th, 2021