Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Oxygen’ on Netflix, a Tense Hybrid-Thriller That Crams Poor Melanie Laurent in a Cryogenic Pod

Netflix’s Oxygen crams poor Melanie Laurent in a box for 100 minutes, and there surely are worse people to hang out with during a cramped, single-location movie. I mean, it could’ve been Mickey Rourke or something; Anne Hathaway was originally attached to the project, and we saw PLENTY of her weep-snot in closeup in Les Miserables and Interstellar. Anyway, Oxygen is from director Alexandre Aja, who’s compiling a kinda diverse resume of genre films — the very weird Daniel Radcliffe vehicle Horns, the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes and 2019’s stupid-fun gators-attack/disaster-flick hybrid Crawl. Well, here’s another interesting one for his filmography.

OXYGEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: CLAUSTROPHOBIA. Liz (Melanie Laurent) awakens in a cocoon inside a coffin. Sort of: the cocoon is some type of thin clothlike membrane, easily torn, and the coffin is a cryogenic pod with a fair amount of wiggle room. She’s strapped down. A harness of wires covers her head. IVs stick out of her toe and arm. She can’t remember that she’s Liz. She can’t remember anything at all, save for memory-flashes with blurry scenes from a hospital or gross, mutated lab rats.

A beeping heart monitor increases its frequency as she panics. She yanks on the straps and pulls the IV needle from her vein. A computer named MILO, manifested as a floating circular blob on a screen on the pod ceiling, speaks via the voice of Mathieu Amalric, who gives the sort-of-character the chilly-soothing tones of HAL-9000 after some effective psychotherapy — but can you ever really be sure? NOPE. MILO is a powerful computer but it doesn’t seem to be artificially intelligent or malevolently programmed, because it answers to Liz’s commands — although there are moments when it unleashes a hypodermic needle on a snaky, motorized arm because it’s determined that Liz really needs a sedative when she doesn’t particularly want one. You, however, may need one after watching that scene.

There’s a conflict here, of course. Liz is awake when she shouldn’t be, because her pod is busted and there’s only so much of the thing in the movie title left to keep her alive. The levels are at 35 percent and ticking down to *gasp*. It’s far from the ideal situation to have memory loss and not know shit about shit, but Liz digs in and tries to figure out who she is and why she’s crammed in here and what those little flashes of memory mean. She asks MILO for information, uses him/it to make phone calls, tries to figure out how to turn off the crazy-ass needle-on-an-arm, hopes to avert power from to the life-support system from other processes and, in a scene of stunning realism, uses him to scroll through her social media feeds for 42 of the 43 minutes she has left to live. (I’m only sort of joking!) In spite of being a little needle-happy and unwilling to cough up info unless she uses specific terminology, MILO can be helpful and seems to be a pretty good friend, but hopefully not a friend for life, because that would mean her life would be far too short.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Oxygen reminded me of the indelible horror of the automated-abortion sequence in Prometheus. Buried Alive also comes to mind, as well as that episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents about the convict who escapes from prison by hiding in a coffin. Buried also put Ryan Reynolds underground in a coffin, alive with only a cell phone, flashlight and a few tools. And unfortunately, Liz can’t fist-punch her way out of there like Uma Thurman did in Kill Bill.

Performance Worth Watching: There’s barely anyone else in this movie beyond Laurent (who we fell in love with during Beginners and Inglourious Basterds), but she doesn’t win this one just by default. She effectively cycles through all the near-death scenario emotions — confusion, hysteria, calmness, desperation, confidence, acceptance, etc. — with all the poignance Aja will allow.

Memorable Dialogue: “Heart rate elevated. Would you like a sedative?” — MILO’s mantra may have some of us wishing we could install him in our own homes

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: In the movie’s most effective scene, Aja spins the camera 180 degrees between the pod ceiling and Laurent’s face numerous times, amplifying the tension as we feel like we’re twirling, twirling, TWIRLING into oblivion with Liz. And yet, Oxygen isn’t as intense as it could have been. That might be a criticism for those of us desiring an unforgettable movie experience instead of a moderately compelling one brought to life by Laurent’s performance. Aja doesn’t generate miserable head-in-a-vice suffocating anxiety by invoking the feeling of being utterly trapped with the reaper’s scythe slowly sawing into your neck, and I don’t know if that’s disappointing or not.

But at the very least, Aja and Laurent create the type of immediacy to compel our emotional involvement in the story. It’s a smart blend of psychological thriller, sci-fi puzzle movie and body horror — oh, the needles, the needles — as Liz tries to shake of her discombobulation and remember how she got in this situation, which is key to piecing together a solution to the dwindling-oxygen problem, and she has to do this while avoiding that damn robot hypodermic, which would render her not awake, a state that’s detrimental to her survival. There’s not much in the way of metaphor or subtext, just a series of juicy-twisty developments that goose our interest at regular intervals as the suspense spikes and pauses, spikes and pauses, like the readout on a heart monitor. It’s not a great movie, but it’s often a pretty damn good one.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Oxygen is equal parts gimmicky and original, and worth a watch if you’re not too claustrophobic or needle-averse.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Oxygen on Netflix