Alexandre Aja Turns Oxygen‘s Sci-Fi Horror Into a Love Letter to Human Survival

If you decide to watch the new sci-fi horror offering Oxygen during your latest Netflix and chill, allow me to impart a word of caution: This film isn’t what you think it is. Alexandre Aja, the acclaimed New French Extremism director responsible for the subgenre’s classic Haute Tension, is known for just that: Extremism. He’s no stranger to pushing his characters into heightened, blood-curdling scenarios where the very fabric of their beings dangle at impossibly high stakes. But where Oxygen differs from the rest of his work is that, ultimately, it is a love letter to human survival—a horrorshow with catharsis running through its veins.
A woman (Mélanie Laurent), awakens in a cryogenic chamber with no memory of her identity or how she got there. M.I.L.O. (Mathieu Amalric), the pod’s onboard computer system, informs her that she has only 33 percent left in her oxygen reserve. We only see the inside of this pod, making her true location a terrifying unknown. Needless to say, escape couldn’t be more critical.
When you set a film in a single location, you drastically limit the playable elements your film has to work with. In turn, this movie is forced to use its script, written like a space-age Agatha Christie novel by Christie LeBlanc, to give us everything: The exposition, the clues, the emotion. Single-location stories can be tricky in this way, especially when “show, don’t tell” is part of every filmmaker’s bible. But pairing the limited visual of a coffin-like structure packed with puzzling buttons and her own prone body strapped to a million different wirings—as mysterious to us as it is to Laurent’s character—with a tight script full of mysteries and shocking answers makes up for the lack of location changes, costumes and hell, even other human characters.
The few others in this film serve very specific purposes in the woman’s quest to get answers about herself and her situation before time runs out. As those people are introduced, short tidbits of disjointed flashbacks (yet to be placed in a timeline) follow suit. We’re constantly doing the mental gymnastics alongside Laurent based on these introductions, but the film does an excellent job of keeping the truth just far enough at bay. Until the time is right, of course—and when the big reveals hit, they hit hard.