Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alexandre Aja
Starring: Mélanie Laurent, Mathieu Amalric, Malik Zidi
Having spent the past 15 years working in Hollywood, French genre
filmmaker Alexandre Aja returns to home soil for sci-fi survival
thriller Oxygen. In similar fashion to Rodrigo Cortés's 2010 Ryan Reynolds vehicle
Buried, the movie is centred on a single protagonist trapped in a confined
box, forced to figure out the mystery of how they got in such a
position, and how to escape.
In this case we're at some point in the future, where cryogenic
suspension has become commonplace. Our heroine, Elizabeth (Melanie Laurent), wakes up inside a cryogenic medical unit with no idea initially of
who she is or why she was put in suspended animation. Where Reynolds
used a cellphone with a dwindling battery to guide himself out of his
predicament in Buried (a film which Aja appears to
acknowledge early on when Elizabeth wonders aloud if she's buried
underground), Elizabeth is aided by MILO, a HAL-9000-esque computer
built into the unit (voiced by Mathieu Amalric).
Though MILO is unhelpful in giving Elizabeth the straight answers she
needs, it does allow her to make phone calls and access the internet.
Using such functions, Elizabeth calls the police, who inform her that
they need to acquire a subpoena to force the manufacturer of the unit to
hand over the codes needed to unlock Elizabeth from her prison. Trouble
is, Elizabeth is using up the unit's oxygen at a rate that MILO
calculates only gives her 45 minutes to live.
Given it’s the central hook that gives the film its title, Elizabeth's
precarious oxygen supply is never exploited to the nail-biting degree it
should. In fact, you'll probably find yourself forgetting about it
altogether until MILO chips in every now and then to remind Elizabeth
and the audience of how much time she has left. While the movie appears
to play out in real-time, it's hard to get a handle on the rate at which
Elizabeth is running out of oxygen, as it seems to deplete in arbitrary
amounts – it's not so much a ticking clock as a faulty watch.
With Elizabeth having access to the internet, along with the flashbacks
to her life before becoming entombed, Oxygen loses much of
the claustrophobic tension its premise initially teases. While having our heroine
strapped down makes things more dramatic, the movie wouldn't really be a
whole lot different if she were simply trapped in a room with a phone
and a PC.
Oxygen suffers from the same central issue as another
recent French thriller set in a confined space – Alexis Bruchon's
The Woman with Leopard Shoes. Both movies give us a single onscreen protagonist and confine them to
a limited setting, and both rely heavily on the use of phones. In
storytelling terms, the drawback of their shared approach is that the
audience only ever knows as much as the protagonist, which eliminates
the potential for suspense. Rather than shouting at the screen to warn
Elizabeth of any dangers and doublecrosses we're privy to, we simply
watch passively as she attempts to crack the mystery. Said mystery is
easy enough to solve for anyone vaguely familiar with the sci-fi genre,
so by the halfway point you'll likely be disengaged.
What made Buried work so well was how it stuck to its
guns, keeping its protagonist in a coffin with no access to the outside
world aside from his phone, but also because it peppered its tense drama
with humour. Oxygen plays its story with a straight face,
and its sober tone and lack of emotional engagement makes its real time
100 minutes suffocating for the wrong reasons.
