"Oxygen" an effectively stressful single-location thriller, until it deflates

 

Oxygen (2021)

Alexandre Aja, he of “High Tension,” “The Hills Have Eyes,” and “Piranha 3D,” knows a thing or three about how to helm a lean, nasty thrill machine. 2019's “Crawl,” while still tense as hell, was probably his most accessible for mainstream audiences. In “Oxygen,” Aja helms this single-location survival thriller almost with as much escape-room ingenuity as Rodrigo Cortés did when he buried Ryan Reynolds in 2010’s “Buried.” As real-time exercises in airtight quarters go, it seems made just so Aja can say he did it and wring as much nail-biting anxiety out of a disaster scenario. At its best, before the mysteries are solved, “Oxygen” is stressful and resourcefully directed by Aja. Most notably, it remains a riveting one-woman showpiece for its emotionally all-in star.

Mélanie Laurent (speaking her native French) is fully strapped in, ready to panic, cry, and hyperventilate, as Elizabeth “Liz” Hansen, a woman who wakes up in a cryogenic pod. She has no memory of who she is, and how she got there and why is a complete blur. Is she in a hospital, underground, or in outer space? Hooked up to an IV and a device monitoring her brain waves and heart rate, Liz can only turn to her Medical Interface Liaison Operator, an A.I. who goes by MILO (voiced by a mechanical if occasionally cheeky Mathieu Amalric) for short. With her oxygen levels only at 35% and set to run out in 90 minutes, only time will tell if she can jog her memory and survive asphyxiation. 

“Oxygen” drops one right in alongside Liz, wrapped in a Cronenbergian cocoon-like suit, and it begins as urgently and gruelingly as it should. The ticking-clock element—or, an oxygen depletion counter?—makes the scenario exceedingly taut and involving for the first 45 minutes or so. But when things could keep escalating, first-timer Christine LeBlanc’s screenplay starts to deflate when it actually starts to fill in the amnesia gaps with flashbacks of Liz’s life before. It's important to have those blanks filled, sure, but not at the cost of the tension it so assuredly built from the onset. Once all of Liz’s questions begin getting answered by MILO (think a more benevolent HAL 9000 blended with Siri), incoming calls, and her own memory, the film surprisingly becomes less interesting and fails to be as emotionally resonant as it intends. The real question that never gets answered is, "Really? That's what we're going with?"

“Oxygen” is most effective when it remains ambiguous and just delivers as a pure stress test, particularly for claustrophobics. Cinematographer Maxime Alexandre achieves sleek camerawork, making some visually dynamic and striking choices, while still making the cramped space appropriately suffocating. We are so up close and personal with Laurent that she probably had to make sure she blew her nose in between takes. Also, the production design is impressively elaborate for the high-tech chamber, utilizing a robotic arm with a syringe that snakes out of a compartment to try sedating Liz in one of the film's more startling sequences. It’s a relief that Alexandre Aja is such an expert craftsman—and that Mélanie Laurent brings as much terror, credibility, and dryly amusing release to the script as she does—because the film would be lost in space otherwise. For ingenuity’s sake, at least Aja and Laurent can say they did the damn thing.

Grade: C +

Netflix is releasing “Oxygen” (100 min.) for streaming on May 12, 2021.