Mark Reviews Movies: OXYGEN (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 11, 2021

A woman wakes up to a claustrophobic nightmare—albeit a very real one—at the start of Oxygen. She's in a cryogenic chamber, covered in tight-fitting sheet and connected to a variety of devices and intravenous tubes.

Freeing herself from the organic covering, the woman only discovers a lot more complications. She has no idea who she is, why she's in this tomb-like space, and who may have locked her inside. The woman is locked inside, too, with no way to open the chamber. Worst of all, the oxygen reserves are running low, meaning she may suffocate before she can solve these assorted mysteries—let alone figure out the puzzle of escaping this confined space.

At the start, Christie LeBlanc's screenplay doesn't provide a lot of information, and for a story as restrictive and restricted as this one, we don't need much information in the first place. This is a tale of impending doom and frantic attempts at survival. LeBlanc and director Alexandre Aja wisely allow us to focus on that for the majority of the first act.

We don't even know—and don't particularly need to know—the woman's name, since the only official record of her existence in this chamber is limited to a code. As for why she's trapped in this chamber, those details hardly matter when we're talking about a span of between half an hour and less than two hours before she can no longer breathe. The only thing that actually matters is for the woman to figure out how to escape.

Aja's approach to this material is smart, in that he never allows the camera to leave the interior of the chamber. It's a self-imposed rule that's broken only twice, and even the one time that it seems to interrupt the feeling of entrapment, the filmmaker gives us a sense that it's the protagonist's view of a bigger picture (The shot travels outward, to a space that will not be revealed here, but it returns to the woman's eye, as if the image is only a reflection of her perspective). There are assorted and scattered flashbacks, revealing details of the character's life, but with them comes no sense of freedom. There's only more imprisonment, as she cannot determine if any of her memories are real or just her mind succumbing to the strains of isolation and her seemingly imminent mortality.

There's a lot to admire, in other words, in the early stages of Aja and LeBlanc's thriller, especially the design of the chamber—which is futuristic, as well as coldly sterile to keep it from becoming a distraction, and even offers its own mood lighting to elevate the confusion, confinement, and fear—and Mélanie Laurent's performance as the imprisoned woman. We'll call the character Elizabeth, since that's the name she soon discovers is likely hers, but again, such details are unimportant. Laurent's face tells the real story here—of terror, of denial, of resolve, of horrified acceptance, of rugged determination.

Beyond her own cunning, Elizabeth's only potential aid inside the chamber is an artificial intelligence called M.I.L.O. (voice of Mathieu Amalric). The computer isn't much of a help and is sometimes a hindrance to Elizabeth's goal. It offers no answers to her questions about herself or how and why she's in the chamber. It refuses to open the hatch, impassively demanding an administrative password to access that function. Detecting that the oxygen in the chamber is low and constantly decreasing, M.I.L.O. keeps offering—and eventually attempts to force, by means of a needle connected to a mechanical arm—a sedative for Elizabeth, if only to decrease her breathing and, later, numb the pain of her forthcoming death.

More things do go amiss—not only for Elizabeth, who faces failures and shortcomings of both technology and the few people with whom she can communicate outside the chamber, but also in terms of the screenplay. The mystery and its answers, not the terrifying scenario and its increasingly unlikely solution, become the point of this story.

By the end, we know everything we need to know about Elizabeth—who she is and isn't—as well as everything about her situation: how she ended up where she is, where that actually is, and what bigger purpose the entirety of her predicament is serving. LeBlanc answers all of these questions by way of flashbacks (mostly regarding the man, played by Malik Zidi, whom Elizabeth believes must be her husband—and who could be the reason she's trapped), phone calls with the outside world (A cop, voiced by Eric Herson-Macarel, promises to rescue her, although tracking the chamber results in multiple dead ends), and picking apart the vast knowledge of M.I.L.O.'s database.

Basically, what begins as a straightforward, restrained, and rather frightening tale becomes something much, much bigger—even though the narrative never really leaves this confined space. In the process, Oxygen loses almost all of its tension. A puzzle of exposition and an assortment of moral, ethical, and existential questions (which the movie has neither time nor concern to address) overwhelm and distract us from the nightmarish scenario.

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