A micro-scale science fiction think piece that punches well above its weight, Netflix’s latest French-language feature, Oxygen, delivers some unexpectedly cathartic claustrophobia.
The premise is simple: a woman wakes up in a cryogenic chamber and discovers she can’t get out.
(For those less acquainted with sci-fi tropes, a cryogenic chamber is a fictional device for cooling human bodies, usually for the purpose of slowing metabolism and thereby extending longevity or combatting disease.)
Hers is an unusual predicament, to be sure, but it would not be quite so bad, perhaps, if it weren’t also that the film’s titular periodic element is rapidly running out.
Luckily for her, though – and for the dramatic interest of those of us looking on – the coffin-sized high-tech prison is futuristic enough to come equipped with an ultra-capable voice-interactive virtual assistant. It helps her to regulate the chamber’s internal systems, place outgoing calls for help, and generally investigate what landed her in this situation.
This proves really helpful, as she is also finding it difficult to remember much of anything, even some of the most elementary pieces of potentially helpful data, for instance, her name (which turns out to be Liz).
Did someone have it in for her and so bury her alive? Are the authorities she speaks with over the phone lying to her? Is there anything she can do to counteract the escalating peril of her situation?
I don’t want to spoil any of the action by answering, but these are the sorts of questions that motivate this tautly told tale and somehow, surprisingly, keep it interesting throughout.
It also makes a difference that the visuals of the film are not strictly limited to the insides of a three-by-six box, however interesting the insides of this box may be. Rather, as Liz gradually pieces together her backstory, we flash via her memories to the house she shared with her husband (or was he?), the controversial medical research she contributed as part of the development cryochambers (or did she?), and the mysterious disease ravaging the planet that precipitated such research’s necessity (or did it?).
This last theme (a world-altering virus) combined with the film’s aesthetic of unremitting involuntary confinement – do either of these sound familiar? – is one of the reasons this film packs a punch that is as timely as it is unexpectedly potent.
(Another reason the film works so well is an absolutely riveting performance by Melanie Laurent, who fills the deliberately constricted dramatic space with a stylish, supercharged intensity.)
These days, though, do any of us really need any more intensely isolated claustrophobia?
Maybe, actually.
If the purpose of art is not only to expand our experience but to reflect it back to us illuminated, I think Oxygen does this, perhaps primarily through its tone.
It shows us isolation. It shows us a woman who rails against it with an animal fury many of us feel and most of us are (probably rightly) nervous to indulge. It then shows us the same woman trying to deal with her situation constructively.
The impotence is real. The infuriation is appropriate. The circumstances are neither helpless nor hopeless.
These days, what do any of us need to hear more?
For all that it accomplishes in its limited scope, though, it may just need to be admitted, too, that this film will probably appeal mostly to sci-fi fans. In other words, nerds can get ready to settle in and nerd out.
But, hey, regular people, if there are any of you still out there, I think there might be something in Oxygen that breathes fresh air into your imaginations as well. Limitations, as much as they might strangle, can also inspire, and if nothing else, what we all might rediscover in this film is just how creative somebody can be in an all but suffocating space.