Review: The Tense Sci-Fi Thriller Oxygen Burnishes Alexandre Aja’s Genre Bona Fides

For its first hour, Alexandre Aja’s Oxygen successfully approximates the feel of an escape room. Liz (Mélanie Laurent) suddenly awakens in a cryogenic chamber, tightly wrapped in a kind of gauze that resembles a moth’s cocoon, an image of entrapment that quickly comes to suggest a symbol of birth. Tearing her way out of the cloth and remembering nothing of her past life—which Aja and Laurent invest with an arresting sense of frustration and emotional violence—Liz begins to sort herself out with the help of M.I.L.O. (voiced by Mathieu Amalric), the cryogenic chamber’s artificial intelligence, which can only answer questions that are authorized as well as asked in a specific, anal-retentive manner.

As in an escape room, there’s the element of a ticking clock to Liz’s predicament. She’s awakened because of a disruption in the cryogenic chamber’s oxygen supply, which is at 30-some percent capacity and draining fast. M.I.L.O. tells Liz that she has between 43 and 72 minutes of oxygen left, depending on her consumption, and the film proceeds along in pseudo-real time as Liz looks for clues that will help her escape, from discerning the identity of the chamber’s maker to learning how to harness M.I.L.O’s ability to place phone calls and perform what are presumably internet searches. In this film of (too) many twists and turns, it takes much time for Liz to even discern her name, and the gleaning of that information involves an amusing bit of semantic jiu jitsu on Liz’s part: When M.I.L.O. can’t or won’t disclose her name directly, Liz asks him to run a DNA check on her.

In thrillers with limited settings, the filmmakers’ tightrope act parallels that of their protagonists: Invention is required to prevent disaster, whether it’s the audience’s boredom or a hero’s demise. Oxygen is derivative but well-designed, as Aja and his collaborators elegantly crib from some of the best modern science-fiction thrillers. For one, the film’s predominant image—of Liz laying down face up toward us, with a blueish pool of light investing her visage with a lovely and poignant heavenly aura—suggests the haunting close-ups of the Precogs in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report—shots that were, in turn, clearly inspired by the agonizingly intimate imagery of Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Minority Report is echoed again, more overtly, as Liz re-explores her memories, which Aja shoots in grainy, somewhat overexposed, melancholically colored hues that recall the look of the Precogs’ visions. Meanwhile, the film’s single most startling effect, a syringe that darts around like a snake trying to sedate Liz against her wishes, recalls the Martians’ terrifying periscope in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. These gimmicks are enough to sustain a glossy, clever B movie, especially with Laurent’s commanding urgency and Amalric’s cheeky ambiguity providing the production with a bit of emotional nutrition. Unfortunately, Oxygen keeps piling on the explanations, growing more ordinary with every revelation.

At the heart of Oxygen is a bit of misdirection that may especially fool people familiar with Aja’s early, nasty thrillers, particularly High Tension and his operatically callous remake of The Hills Have Eyes. For its first half, Oxygen seems to be building to a morbid, amusingly reductive revelation: that, in spite of all the intricate plot turns and red herrings, Liz has simply been buried alive. No need to spell things out, but Aja and screenwriter Christie LeBlanc follow a more sentimental path, suggesting that we’re seeing in real time the entirety of a life, from birth to self-discovery to formative struggle to maybe death. In other words, the filmmakers trade in Spielberg’s techno-horror for the uplift of Duncan Jones’s Moon and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. After Crawl and Oxygen, Aja seems to be well on his way to achieving respectability as a dependable genre journeyman, at the expense of the puckish mean streak that appeared to be the chief wellspring of his artistic personality.