Oxygène
Directed by Alexandre Aja
Produced by Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur, Vincent Maraval, Brahim Chioua, Noëmie Devide
Written by Christie LeBlanc
Starring Mélanie Laurent, Mathieu Amalric, Malik Zidi
Music by Rob
Oxygène won’t be for everyone. It’s claustrophobic, apoxic, has some horrifically gruesome medical situations and bodies disfigured by massive violence, combined with extreme, intense suspense. Oh, and did I mention the rats ? Lots of rats, some turned inside out. If you happen to be triggered by any of those things, you might want to take baby steps with this film.
The problem isn’t that it’s a bad movie. No, quite the opposite. It’s an extraordinarily good movie. It’s a mystery, it’s a suspense, and it’s intelligent science fiction, and it works its way up to a level of psychological horror worthy of Harlen Ellison. A more subtle version of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
A woman wakens in blackness. She doesn’t know where she is, or how she got there. She doesn’t even remember her name, or any details of her life. Something is covering her face, a kind of fibrous netting, and she finds it extremely hard to breathe. She claws desperately at the netting over her mouth, finally tearing it open, and she takes several deep, grateful gasps. Tearing more from her head, she discovers that she is in a small container of some sort, lit up with LEDs and displays, A scull cap of electrodes is attached to her head and several IVs and a feeding tube are attached to her body. A soft alarm is dinging in the background. “Ou suis-je?” she demands. (Netflix has both English dubbing and subtitles, but the descrepancies between the two got annoying and so I switched to French with English subs).
A computer voice tells her she is in a cyrogenic pod, made by Cryosalide, and there has been a malfunction and her oxygen reserves have dropped to 33%. She has about 90 minutes—about the run time of the movie—to figure out what’s going on and how to prevent a slow death by asphyxiation.
Adding to the claustrophobic air of the movie is the fact that Aja filmed nearly all of the movie in extreme facial closeup on Mélanie Laurent, giving a sharp immediacy to to an already vivid performance.
The other half of the story is M.I.L.O. the computer (voiced by Mathieu Amalric) who speaks in a pleasant baritone and manages to be as sinister as Ellison’s AM, or Kubrick’s HAL. The uninflicted nature of his responses is perhaps the best depiction of an AI I’ve seen.
While other people feature in this, either in flashbacks or as disembodied voices over the phone, it’s very much a two-person show, Laurent and Amalric, and it is a riveting interaction. Between Aja’s direction and Christie LeBlanc’s screenplay, it makes for an engrossing and fairly profound film.
Now on Netflix