Being buried alive is a strangely common fear. Once upon a time, it was… well, not an everyday occurrence, but it wasn’t exactly rare either. It persisted in literature through Edgar Allan Poe’s work, eventually becoming a pulp trope. Playing pulp tropes straight is less and less common. But something about being buried alive lingers in the popular imagination. Oxygen, a French sci-fi thriller recently released on Netflix, has the a great variation on the buried-alive hook and a phenomenal lead actor. But can it stay engaging for the full 100 minute runtime?
Oops
A woman (Mélanie Laurent) wakes up in what appears to be a hi-tech coffin. Her vitals are tracked and displayed, but she doesn’t know who she is or how she got there. Thankfully, she’s not completely alone: MILO (Mathieu Amalric), a medical AI, is there to answer her questions. Unfortunately, MILO is stubbornly literal. He won’t interpret her commands unless she uses the right language, has the right codes.
Normally, this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. One thing you have when you’re trapped in a single enclosed space is time. But the woman, who MILO called Omicron 267, has a more pressing issue: She’s running out of oxygen. She has to figure out who she is and how she got there — and she has to figure out how to escape. Otherwise, she’ll run out of breathable air, or be mercy-killed by MILO.
I forgot to note lines
While there are brief flashbacks and other voice actors, this really is Mélanie Laurent’s show. While Netflix gives you the option the watch the film with an English dub, I really recommend sticking with the original French — Laurent can barely move, and so much of her performances comes from her face and voice here, that eliminating one of the two seems almost cruel.
Laurent is likely most well-known to American audiences as Shoshanna from Inglorious Basterds, though she recently appeared in the abysmal Netflix-original 6 Underground. Tarantino’s film used her beautifully; Shoshanna is evocative in her pain, her fear, the growing tension of her plot for vengeance. In Oxygen, she demonstrates that she can hold audiences captive without really moving at all. She is the rare actor who can physically portray thinking in a way that’s interesting and character-driven. I don’t believe the movie could be half as effective without the nuance of Laurent’s performance, including vocally.
I also want to mention director Alexadre Aja. Aja broke out of the New French Extremity movement with Haute Tension in 2003, one of the few directors to really translate success in the particularly brutal horror microgenre to a more mainstream American career. Unfortunately, many Americans likely first encountered him in his remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and Piranha. Both have their defenders, but neither used Aja’s talent for punctuating powerful tension with bursts of brutality to their fullest extent. I admit, I wrote him off.
And then Crawl happened. 2019’s Crawl was a genuinely excellent monster movie. Set in Florida during a hurricane, it found two people trapped in the crawl space beneath the house with an alligator. Crawl forced Aja to pare back some of the excess of bigger budget horror remakes and focus on a couple characters and a single location. Oxygen sees Aja take that basic idea — a single-set thriller with a limited cast — to its extreme. And while it doesn’t quite live up to the pulpy thrill of Crawl for me, I definitely think that Aja is back on track to forging a memorable career. Oxygen is clean and sleek where Crawl is grimy and derelict, but both come from the same classic pulp roots. Aja knows how to make that old music sing beautifully.
I do that sometimes.
Speaking of pulp roots, here’s the thing about being buried alive: We get how it works. The stakes are obvious, as are the solutions. Sometimes those solutions can be subverted for entertainment, as with the Bride punching her way free of a coffin in Kill Bill Part 2. But we understand how it works. You go in the small box. Dirt covers it. You run out of oxygen. Then you die.
So a sci-fi movie in which someone awakens in a medical cryo-tube runs into a potential problem. What are the rules? I know that a coffin won’t, for instance, suddenly be able to provide me with food or water. Can a hi-tech cryo-stasis pod? No idea. Thankfully, Aja and writer Christie LeBlanc work all this out pretty quickly by turning it into, essentially, a high-stakes game of twenty-questions. Like us, Laurent’s character doesn’t know the rules of the pod. It clearly has a lot of features and abilities; it has a fully functional AI assistant after all.
But MILO is a worryingly literal helper. He can do many things… if you know how to ask. Amnesia is another classic pulp trope, and it’s one that Oxygen plays with a lot. The film has a weird, almost bureaucratic tension that I found weirdly relatable: Can Laurent figure out how to navigate the rules long enough to stay alive? It’s no Ikiru, but that’s a genuinely neat twist to the buried-alive trope that the film uses well. So much of the bureaucratic machinery of our lives exists to hinder us. We’ve all been sent in circles by an automated call system at the bank or the doctor’s office, a cost-cutting measure that makes our lives collectively more miserable but saves companies from having to pay a human being for work. LeBlanc just applied that very modern anxiety to a classic pulp trope. They mix shockingly well.
Sorry.
For a time, at least. A hundred minutes is a long time for a single-location thriller, and there are moments when I felt the drag. As the reveals piled up — who is Laurent really? Why is she here? Where even is here? — they became, by and large, less meaningful and less interesting. It did capture a moment of surprising grandeur for a film with such a limited scope, but for the most part, Laurent’s character becomes unfortunately sidelined, despite the film almost never leaving her side. I think that happens often with mysteries, as characters take a back-seat to events, but it still disappointed me.
But even as the storytelling gets slack, Aja is enough of a pro that the tension never really lets up. He knows how to put Laurent through the physical wringer, and she knows how to sell some potentially goofy moments of peril. Together, they hold the film together. Oxygen remains breathtaking throughou–
fuck, no, wait, that’s corny as shit. Oxygen‘s tension is powerful, almost suffocating at–no, no, no.
Look, it’s a good movie. Let’s stop there before I accidentally pun.