Director: Alexandre Aja
Notable
Cast: Melanie Laurent, Malik Zidi, Mathieu Amalric
Although I am quite a fan of Alexandre Aja as a director,
the general concept of his latest film, the Netflix released Oxygen,
where a woman wakes up trapped in a high-tech cryotube, is still pretty basic.
The buried alive motif is a relatively common one in genre storytelling and
there are quite a few films that already do it with impressive results. Hell,
even Ryan Reynolds was in a decent one, Buried, just a decade ago.
Imagine my surprise that Oxygen, originally titled O2,
comes out looking to set the archetype for the modern ‘buried alive’ angle.
It's a tight and impressively balanced techno-thriller, tense in its use of
both the suffocating setting and the reveal of increasingly devastating
information, that maximizes its mystery and its science fiction angle to
deliver thrills and occasional chills.
