Oxygen wasn’t nearly as tense as I expected for a movie so claustrophobic. Not that it’s always trying to be in fairness. It’s more of a mystery than a thriller for much of its’ runtime, as it follows Elizabeth (Melanie Laurent) trying to piece together who and where she is in real time while trapped in some kind of computerized medical cryo-unit no bigger than a coffin. For both her and the audience, fear gives way to desperate curiosity as twist after twist of her circumstance is revealed. Claustrophobia was a major theme of the last movie by director Alexandre Aja too, the alligator horror Crawl, where much of the movie takes place in a flooding basement. Oxygen though doesn’t feel quite as constrictive or urgent as those scenes in that movie do; it’s intimate, but with a kind of freedom in the filmmaking. The stakes aren’t as visceral, though they are more dramatic. Because what the movie is about goes far beyond the simplicity of escape.
It’s very difficult to talk about that without delving into spoilers, this is a very different movie at its’ end than it is at its’ beginning. And the reliance on twists is something of a crutch for Oxygen. The context of Elizabeth’s captivity keeps changing, aspects of the reasons for it and even her identity itself fluctuating right up until just about the end. The movie tries to impress so much in these that it distracts from the emotional investment in Elizabeth, the aforementioned innate horror of her entrapment, and the tension of the ticking clock. Given the changing circumstances, none of the big revelations are particularly outrageous (a benefit perhaps of the films’ shifting reality, but also the strong acting and directing), though it does feel like writer Christie LeBlanc is constantly trying to top herself; or that she didn’t know where the film was going to end when she started writing it, new ideas coming to mind and informing the films’ renewed narrative and thematic direction as it went along.
A convoluted plot though isn’t much of a hindrance to Aja’s direction, which is pretty good given his lack of options. He’s able to keep the filmmaking interesting in such an enclosed space by never quite using the same shot the same way twice. He plays with expectations and occasionally injects a conventional scare, such as when Elizabeth hallucinates mice crawling at her feet in relation to a memory she can’t quite fully comprehend. And he makes sure to illustrate this capsule with character. It’s not a dark and featureless wood box as in the similar film Buried; it’s relatively lit, intricately technical, and the designs curious. There are a couple labels by which Elizabeth can infer some sense of bearing, and it has other elaborate functions that become apparent as the film progresses. There are moments though where Aja cheats, cuts a couple times to the world outside of Elizabeth’s tomb, and he makes heavy use of the A.I. computer M.I.L.O (voiced by Mathieu Amalric) as a device for depicting scenes and images of the world beyond and of Elizabeth’s life before this happened to her. The visuals for M.I.L.O’s interface, this great advanced computer screen facing Elizabeth, creates an illusion of depth too that prevents the pod from feeling as restrictive as it might. It’s comforting even, but perhaps deceptively so, as everything about this circumstance prompts questioning.
Melanie Laurent has the utmost responsibility for this movie, as apart from an apparent husband (Malik Zidi) who appears in photos and short video clips, she is the only human being the film provides us to attach to. Her only scene partner is a disembodied voice. But Laurent of course is a pretty great actress and manages well through all the shapes this movie undergoes, responding to them with appropriate incredulousness and fear. Often, her stress and emotionality is the only thing legitimizing the story’s various turns and new dramatic stakes as well; and for as confined as she is, her physical performance is quite good too.
Most importantly though, Laurent conveys the weight of each new layer to Elizabeth’s identity, the ever-anomalous nature of which becomes one of the films’ strongest ideas. She works off of clues to figure this out, mental images of mice and the face of a man she has strong feelings for, but to whom the finer details of their relationship are a mystery. The ultimate course of this personal journey and especially its’ last twist is not particularly unique, but there is something deeply compelling to the way it figures Elizabeth’s agency and her choices, her intuitive connection to her sense of self in spite of changing contexts. This goes hand in hand with the budding information about the world outside, which is claimed or inferred to be multiple things over the course of the movie by the few figures Elizabeth is able to briefly contact and the gathering information M.I.L.O is able to obtain. It’s not a spoiler to note that the police of course are unreliable. And that’s not the only side that feels timely, as the real truth of her circumstance and the reason behind it is chillingly pertinent. This movie was shot during the pandemic, and may be the first mostly good one to have been made in lockdown. But that fact makes it difficult to ignore how COVID clearly informed some details of the narrative, and I don’t think its’ an accident Netflix chose to release it at a time where (for most of its audience) the end of this plague is in sight.
Oxygen can be a difficult movie, far more comprehensive than it initially appears. Nor is it the claustrophobia thriller some might expect–that part of it is always there but easily neglected the more complex things get. The scope of its’ ambitions aren’t completely met, perhaps due to the rate of the plotting –which does put too much stock in its’ zealous twists. But Aja’s smart direction, Laurent’s encompassing performance, and the ruminative themes on identity, persona, and human endurance carry it through alright. Not the worst movie to be trapped in for two hours.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
Comments
Post a Comment