We all have a morbid fear of being buried alive; nothing terrifies more than the thought of waking up in the cold and the dark in a small, enclosed environment with no way to get out and no idea how long our air supply will last and what will happen as we gasp our last breath, scrabbling away at our surroundings in a desperate and feeble attempt to free ourselves. Rodrigo Cortes’ 2010 film Buried, starring Ryan Reynolds, perfectly encapsulated the raw, naked horror of this hideously unthinkable predicament and it’s a theme Alexandra (Crawl) Aja returns to in Oxygen, a French language space thriller (don’t worry, there are dubbed and subtitled versions available) starring Melanie Laurent. Oxygen has much of the stifling sense of unease of Buried but its futuristic setting affords it a greater distance from our deepest, primal fears and allows us to watch it with a sense of curious detachment rather than spine-tingling, nerve-shredding dread.
Laurent plays a woman who wakes up in a futuristic cryogenic suspension unit; the glowing, flickering control units all around her instantly defuse some of the discomfort we might feel as outsiders observing at her situation. She has no idea who she is, where she is or why she is there. Her only point of contact is the calm and reassuring voice of computer system MILO (Mathie Amalric) whose only form of solace to assuage her mounting panic is to offer her a sedative. Her panic is entirely understandable too – as well as quite palpable; her oxygen supply is down to 33% and time is running out if she is to make contact with anyone who can help her before she suffocates. She communicates with people who offer help but none is forthcoming and she is troubled by odd flashbacks, disconnected images from a life she can’t remember. With her oxygen level dropping rapidly, she makes contact with someone who offers a glimmer of hope but the woman is forced to come to terms with who she is and why she is trapped in this strange, isolated place.
Oxygen is an impressive chamber piece even if it (thankfully) lacks the real, hard edge of Buried. We still feel the woman’s sense of dislocation and helpnessness, trapped in her hi-tech tomb but it’s really her lack of identity and her lack of self-awareness that bears the story’s dramatic weight. As the film progresses – and it spends perhaps a little too long establishing the predicament rather than how the woman can even begin to deal with it – it starts to offer up answers to the questions that have been tormenting both its protagonist and the audience. How satisfying you find those answers is another matter but suffice to say there are a few surprises, an unexpected but quite welcome gory jump-scare moment, and a resolution that seems a little bit convenient even as it’s quite effective and uplifting.
Filmed in July 2020 – yes, there was a 2020 – Oxygen manages to encapsulate all those feelings of isolation, despair and uncertainty that characterised a year in lockdown far more successfully and artfully and other less subtle pandemic-themed thrillers. Melanie Laurent’s performance is sensational and the coldly sterile space setting delivers a very different and marginally less visceral type of ‘buried alive’ experience but which is, perhaps inevitably, rarely less uncomfortable and disconcerting.
Oxygen is available now on Netflix
