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Alexandre Aja makes a very different kind of confined spaces thriller to follow up his great “ Crawl ” in this week’s also-great “Oxygen,” premiering today on Netflix. It may have been in development before the world knew anything about COVID-19 (and once had Anne Hathaway attached), but this truly feels like the most 'pandemic thriller' yet in its own unpredictable way. It’s a film about isolation, loss, and an uncertain future. Shot in July 2020, it clearly reflects all of the international concerns about diminishing oxygen intakes even as it unfolds in a manner that seems unimaginable. Most of all, it features a stunning performance from the great Mélanie Laurent (“ Inglourious Basterds ”), who owns the screen as the film’s only real character. With robust direction in an incredibly confined space and Laurent’s phenomenal work, “Oxygen” should feel like a breath of fresh air for people looking for something to watch on Netflix. (Sorry.)

Laurent plays Liz Hansen, a doctor who wakes up in a cryogenic chamber with no memory of how she got there. In fact, her memories seem jumbled and inconsistent altogether, adding to her confusion. At first, she’s not even sure of her own name, or her professional or personal background. As these memories start to filter in, she communicates with an on-board computer named MILO (voiced by Mathieu Amalric ), who sometimes sounds only slightly less nefarious than HAL when it comes to projections regarding Hansen’s odds of survival. You see, the chamber is losing oxygen fast. Liz has to figure out who she is, why she’s there, and how to fix her nightmare situation. It’s not unlike “ Buried ” meets “2001: Space Odyssey,” which is a hell of an elevator pitch.

The first half-hour of “Oxygen” is its most effective as the film unfolds like a mystery wherein a victim has to ask the right questions to figure out how to save her life. She has a supercomputer at her disposal in MILO but it’s a system that only responds—it doesn’t think for itself. She can’t just tell MILO to figure shit out. She has to ask the right questions to get the truth of why she’s there and how she can escape. Why has no one responded to MILO’s distress signal? Why do calls to home and authorities seem to be getting her nowhere? Why can’t she even remember her own past other than in fleeting images? One of the fun things about “Oxygen” is that there are concrete answers to all of these questions by the time the movie is over. Unlike some recent high-concept sci-fi, the pieces fit in “Oxygen.” It might be neat to rewatch the film after all of its secrets have been revealed, but it’s that first view wherein we know only as much as Liz knows that’s so riveting.

Naturally, given the entire film (other than glimpses of flashbacks or memories) takes place in the chamber, Aja asks a lot of Laurent. She delivers and then some. Running an entire gamut of emotions from fear to anger to grief, Laurent gives what will easily be one of the best performances of 2021. She’s perfect for this part, reminding viewers of her incredible range while locked into a performance in which she basically only uses her face and voice.

Some people won’t be completely satisfied by the final act of “Oxygen,” but I think it holds together, and it’s undeniably remarkable even if judged purely as an acting exercise. Thanks largely to Aja’s momentum and Laurent’s performance, I also found it surprisingly moving for this kind of high-concept thriller. Liz wakes up to a situation she never imagined and has to figure out how to save herself before her oxygen runs out. Flashbacks to hospitals with masked patients and doctors place the tension even more firmly in the COVID era while never explicitly drawing that parallel in a way that heightens the tension. Without spoiling anything, it becomes a film that intertwines both grief and optimism, which kind of defines where so much of the world is at in 2021, assessing what we’ve lost while hoping for the future.

(Note: Netflix often defaults to dubbed versions. Watch this in French. Mine started dubbed and you'd lose so much of Laurent's performance if you let someone else speak for her.)

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Oxygen (2021)

100 minutes

Mélanie Laurent as Elizabeth Hansen

Mathieu Amalric as M.I.L.O

Malik Zidi as Léo Ferguson

Marc Saez as Ortiz

• Alexandre Aja
• Christie LeBlanc

Cinematographer

• Maxime Alexandre
• Stéphane Roche
• Robin Coudert

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‘Oxygen’ Review: The Thrill of Claustrophobia

Trapped in a cryogenic chamber with oxygen levels dwindling, a woman must learn how to team up with the machine in order to escape.

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By Lena Wilson

Since shocking his way into popular culture with the 2003 lesbian exploitation slasher “High Tension,” the horror director Alexandre Aja has led grand, English-language productions: remakes of “The Hills Have Eyes” and “Maniac,” as well as the bombastic horror-comedy “Piranha 3D.”

“Oxygen,” filmed during summer 2020 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic and now streaming on Netflix, is Aja’s return to French-language cinema. It also shows how much better the director can do with a sparse script (written by Christie LeBlanc).

The film takes place almost entirely within a cryogenic chamber slightly larger than a coffin. The film follows a woman (Mélanie Laurent) after a malfunction jolts her out of hypersleep. Trapped and with oxygen levels dwindling, she must learn how to team up with the machine, controlled by a sinister-yet-pleasant A.I. named Milo (Mathieu Amalric), in order to escape.

The premise is simple, but this twist-filled script by LeBlanc gives Laurent ample opportunity to shine. Because of its limited setting, the film hangs on Laurent’s acting ability, and she gamely vaults between elation, terror and determination. Aja maintains tension throughout, using horror conventions — and a few cheap jump scares — to routinely shock the audience back to attention. Though “Oxygen” is more thriller than horror, these manipulations keep the film taut, even as its script bends credulity.

The film’s opening is immediately gripping, sending viewers into a claustrophobic nightmare. When the protagonist is jarred awake, she must fight her way through a protective sac. Introduced by the sound of a beating heart and images of deformed lab rats, the first shots of Laurent’s face promise something monstrous underneath. Her features are elongated by red lights and her shallow breaths sound more animal than human. When Laurent’s face becomes visible, her fingers break through the cocoon like the chestbursters of “Alien.” The effect is uncanny, disorienting viewers and immediately aligning them with the film’s addled lead.

“Oxygen” is a film defined by its lack of space, and its art and animation departments have expertly constructed a cryochamber that is both visually pleasing and appropriately creepy. The A.I. Milo is rendered as a Siri-like circle of pulsating waves, occasionally offering up other interfaces for Laurent to navigate. As Milo’s voice, Almaric matches the cool, detached energy of his surroundings, while simultaneously winning trust as his captor’s only ally. The two even share a few wry exchanges, lending humor to an otherwise dour narrative.

“Oxygen” is the rare genre film that is tight enough to actually succeed on streaming. It will make you put your phone on the other side of the living room for a little while longer — or at least make you grateful you have a whole room to cross.

Oxygen Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

Lena Wilson is a project manager at The New York Times and a freelance writer covering film, TV, technology and lesbian culture. More about Lena Wilson

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Oxygen review – air runs out for claustrophobic survival nightmare

Mélanie Laurent is excellent as a woman who wakes up in a cryogenic pod with enough oxygen to last the length of the film

H ere is a single-location mystery thriller from first-time feature screenwriter Christie LeBlanc which is more than a bit on the preposterous side. It requires some hefty levels of disbelief suspension and plausibility buy-in. But the excellent Mélanie Laurent (from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds) sells it hard, and it’s a rather elegant contrivance, more restrained than usual from this director, the shlock-horror specialist Alexandre Aja.

Laurent plays a woman who wakes up enclosed in a cryogenic hi-tech pod, slightly bigger than a coffin, surrounded by screens and readouts, hooked up to various life-support wires. She can’t remember who she is or why she is there, although she is almost immediately plagued with traumatised flashbacks of being rushed into hospital. Or is she rushing someone else into hospital? She can’t move. She can’t get out. And, increasingly, she can’t breathe. She realises that her oxygen levels will last only around a 100 minutes, the length of the film, in fact, which plays out in real time. And her only friend, the only one who can help her in this claustrophobic nightmare, is the velvety Hal-type voice of the controlling computer, drolly provided by Mathieu Amalric, which in time-honoured style is inscrutable, but with a hint that it knows more and could do more than it is letting on.

It’s a high-concept script that reminded me a little of Rodrigo Cortés’s Buried from 2010 , which the camera got up close and personal with Ryan Reynolds, who is buried alive – a metaphor for American involvement in Iraq. In some ways, this is a film for the Covid-lockdown era, although claiming its “oxygen” theme as contemporary commentary would not perhaps be in great taste. In some ways, this works better without the metaphorical reading – as just a far-fetched, but quite ingenious entertainment, with some bold climactic touches.

Oxygen is on Netflix.

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The claustrophobic Oxygen tests a new direction for Netflix’s sci-fi strategy

But it’s strikingly similar to other recent quarantine and small-scale science fiction

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In a new Netflix thriller, a female scientist is stuck in a small, contained environment, and must figure out how to survive as oxygen levels become dangerously low. If this sounds familiar, it’s possible that you’ve recently watched Stowaway , the hit Netflix movie starring Anna Kendrick , the latest big-name performer to explore psychological and moral complexities in outer space . But it’s also the basic description for Oxygen , a second constricted-space, low-oxygen thriller on Netflix — and yet another instance of the streaming service colonizing territory formerly occupied by traditional studio releases.

Oxygen is less of a straight astronaut story than either Stowaway or last winter’s Netflix offering The Midnight Sky . Much of this French film is set inside a room so tiny that the woman (Mélanie Laurent) it contains can barely sit up, much less rise to her feet and walk around. It’s an ante-upping formal challenge for director Alexandre Aja, following his satisfying limited-location thriller Crawl , where a young woman squared off against some mean alligators in a flooded house. At first, the woman at the center of Oxygen doesn’t know any more about the capsule she’s in than the audience does. She wakes up disoriented and terrified, with only flashes of memories indicating who she is, or why she’s been wrapped in some kind of futuristic, breathable plastic. (Initially, the covered jut of her jaw looks like the silhouette of the xenomorph from Alien .) She’s been in cryo-sleep for an undetermined amount of time, and memory is slow to return.

Her immediate challenge, though, is frighteningly clear: The oxygen levels in her pod are at about 35% and dropping, and she must fumble her way through a voice-activated computer interface whose solutions — sedatives, mostly — are offered with menacing pushiness. Her capsule is locked, and though she’s able to figure out how to make outgoing phone calls, reception is fuzzy, and finding the right contact information involves a lot of trial and error. The logistics of Oxygen are more sci-fi than the human drama of Stowaway . In the latter, much of the dialogue addresses the moral and ethical dilemmas in attempting to save both individual lives and a crucially important mission. In Oxygen , Laurent repeatedly has to dodge an automated hypodermic needle, advancing on her like an aggressive snake.

Oxygen is a cheesy exploitation thriller, to some degree, with the catch that Aja has become skilled at locating both human interest and immediacy within the confines of cheesy exploitation thrillers. As in Crawl , he knows when to lean on his central performer, and tells a lot of his story through Laurent’s acting, which balances intelligence and resourcefulness with what the MTV Movie Awards have sometimes referred to as the “scared as shit” performance. Oxygen isn’t a horror film, but Aja’s horror background seems to goad him into tightening the suspense, even flirting with moments of body horror when Lauren has to fiddle with the tubes that have kept her character in cryo, and now threaten to override her decisions if she can’t take control of the computer.

Oxygen ’s biggest sci-fi ideas are largely cribbed from other, more thoughtful movies, and it takes a while before the eventually twisty story starts offering up genuine surprises. (The first big story turn, regarding the location of Laurent’s pod-like structure, is something many viewers will assume from the opening.) But Aja’s film was shot during the pandemic in summer of 2020, and there are faint echoes of quarantine life in watching someone try to figure out their identity by sifting through digital photos, like someone scrolling through their Instagram feed to remember their own Before Times.

Oxygen also feels like a pandemic movie by virtue of premiering on Netflix, a service whose capacity to echo our tastes and cinematic experiences back to us has seemingly increased over the past year. Both Oxygen and Stowaway closely resemble movies that have played in theatrical release, whether it’s the white-knuckle peril of Gravity or Crawl , the claustrophobia of Buried or Phone Booth , or the careful problem-solving of The Martian . This isn’t always a given with Netflix originals, some of which inevitably feel more like TV movies than refugees from movie theaters. Oxygen is certainly a cut above in that department; its resemblance to past movies also makes this one a bit uncanny.

It isn’t unusual for mainstream movies to reflect the zeitgeist, whether in intentional ways or not. In that sense, Oxygen , Stowawa y, and The Midnight Sky all belong on the recent spectrum of Hollywood movies that explore space travel, astronaut peril, and the possibility of colonization, with COVID-19 providing a new lens for their isolated, repopulation-centric stories. Yet these Netflix thrillers also feel like they’ve been shrunk down and recalibrated for a particular kind of home-viewing experience, like they exist in their own enclosed space.

In some ways, this is a promising development; Oxygen is small-scale sci-fi, with plentiful thrills and minimal bombast, as much a locked-pod mystery as anything else. Taken alongside Stowaway , through, and in such close proximity, the films feel like an algorithm A/B testing similar stories, scanning the audience for optimal response that will inform future astronaut narratives.

That’s where the cheaper thrills and intrigue of Oxygen give it an advantage. While Stowaway ’s attempts at thoughtfulness add up to a movie that compellingly imitates other space narratives without finding its own voice, Aja’s delight in putting viewers through a wringer feels honest. So does his embrace of his movie’s (and distributor’s) limitations, where the vastness of future technology must be adaptable to an unspectacular 40-inch TV screen. At times, watching Oxygen simulates that futuristic confine all too well. Breathable air may run out, but content will keep churning forever.

Oxygen is now streaming on Netflix.

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Oxygen Reviews

Oxygen’s relevance strikes like lightning in a year when time is measured less by Earth’s tilt and more by first wave, second wave, red phase, yellow phase; not by time passing daily, but by how much danger remains in the room.

Full Review | Jan 8, 2024

Starring a superb Mélanie Laurent, Alexandre Aja’s Oxygen is both a claustrophobic survival thriller and an introspective drama about memory, identity, and the ethics of scientific advancement.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 15, 2023

Oxygen is a phenomenal example of one-location filmmaking done right. Brutal moral dilemmas, surprising discoveries about the mysterious protagonist, and a fantastic one-woman show from Mélanie Laurent keep the slow, flashback-heavy narrative engrossing.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 24, 2023

I don’t want Aja to stop making his trademark ultraviolent schlock-horrors. But as a detour, Oxygen is definitely a refreshing and welcome change.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

Oxygen isn’t really a horror film, but it does deliver a similar case of uneasiness.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | May 2, 2023

This sci-fi gem is incredibly tense.

Full Review | Apr 5, 2023

As the tension build to excruciating levels at the climax, Oxygen will have viewers so caught up in the action they will need to check they are still breathing.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 12, 2022

A breathless thriller that doesn’t let up from minute one until the very end.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 22, 2022

An audacious and absorbing slice of genre entertainment.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 17, 2022

With a script that thoughtfully integrates the story's twists and turns for maximum emotional impact and a central performance that places us right in the thick of our protagonist's turmoil, "Oxygen" is genre filmmaking at its finest.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 14, 2022

It is clear that there is inspiration behind the project with not a single piece of the feature simply going through the motions, but due to one major misfire - in this case the screenplay - the entire film falls apart on a weak foundation.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Feb 15, 2022

Oxygen is entertaining for its duration, though not without moments of questionable credibility for even casual sci-fi aficionados.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 12, 2022

There's a few plot issues that may prove troublesome for some (involving telephone signals), but on the whole this is a tense ride that will work over your terror center.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2021

It works, just about, thanks to the energetic distress of Ms Laurent.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 20, 2021

Demonstrates [director Alexandre Aja's] great abilities as a storyteller of suspense. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 26, 2021

An effective and intelligent storyteller, Aja confirms that in the cinema it is not always necessary to flood the screen with characters or effects. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 22, 2021

There's no real problem solving, there's no real anxiety, and there's certainly nothing here you haven't seen elsewhere.

Full Review | Jun 6, 2021

Both the scenarios and the special effects are accomplished in this modest sci-fi flick.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 5, 2021

One of Netflix's juiciest one-off thrillers.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jun 3, 2021

All I will say is that after watching this movie you will want your passwords etched in stone.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 1, 2021

‘Oxygen’ Review: Mélanie Laurent Fights for Air in High-Concept Netflix Thriller

After goring it up with movies such as “Crawl” and “Piranha 3D,” French horror helmer Alexandre Aja tries his hand at a more airtight scenario.

By Peter Debruge

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SPOILER  A LERT: The following review contains spoilers.

A clever example of creativity thriving within the strict protocols of the coronavirus pandemic, tense confinement thriller “ Oxygen ” plays like “Buried” in outer space: a ticking-clock sci-fi survival drama centered on a single character (“Inglourious Basterds” star Mélanie Laurent) trapped in a spiffy, coffin-like cryochamber with critically low reserves of breathable air. The blank-brained “bioform” awakens ahead of schedule, sealed in some kind of futuristic membrane, with only a helpful HAL 9000-like talking computer called MILO (short for Medical Interface Liaison Operator, voiced by Mathieu Amalric) to assist her.

Making his first French-language feature since “High Tension,” extreme-horror helmer Alexandre Aja injects a bit too much outside-the-box style into Christie LeBlanc’s bare-bones, Black List-selected screenplay. But the timing is fortuitous: Here’s a high-concept Netflix movie, originally intended for another actress (Noomi Rapace, who retains an exec producer credit), that was shot in the window between France’s initial COVID-19 lockdown and the industry-hammering second wave.

Arriving now, as humankind tentatively emerges from a kind of global hypersleep, the film’s basic scenario ought to resonate with the isolation audiences have been experiencing in their own lives — and the larger question of whether we really want to return to what we knew before. This is a proactive choice, and one that Laurent’s character must make as her oxygen levels drop, with only a limited time to ascertain her situation, recover her memories and save herself.

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Aja’s directorial interference can be distracting at times, but that’s not necessarily an accident. As if he didn’t want viewers to realize just how limited his skeleton cast and crew were in executing the film, the helmer embellishes his key location — a sleek white cryo pod of the kind that Apple designer Jony Ive would no doubt imagine, if tasked with deep-freezing human specimens — with frequent flashbacks and a few massive-scale visual effects shots.

Elaborating on the latter would spoil the surprise, although how many possible explanations can there be for why a person is waking up in a cryochamber? To describe LeBlanc’s solution as far and away the most obvious would be an understatement. Still, it’s the specifics that make the puzzle interesting, as Laurent’s Liz — or Omicron 267, as MILO first identifies her — races to put the pieces together.

For the first hour, Aja splices visual clues into the claustrophobic scenario: shots of lab rats in mazes, unethical medical experiments and flashes of what Liz presumes to be her past life involving beardy fellow doctor — and possible husband — Léo (Malik Zidi). Trouble is, every time editor Stéphane Roche cuts away, Aja’s “let’s open things up as much as possible” strategy breaks the spell of being trapped in a bubble with Liz. Also, the more we see outside her pod, the faster we figure out her predicament. And it can be frustrating waiting for her to catch up, especially since she’s the one supplying red herrings most audiences can see through straightaway.

A benign and mostly compliant AI (with the capacity to shock or inject her, if necessary), MILO is more than just the key tool in Liz’s problem-solving kit: He’s a sounding board for everything that goes through her head. The trick is to know what to ask him, turning the entire film into an extended game of “20 Questions.” Turns out he’s also a long-distance operator, helping her place a series of scratchy phone calls to the police, to Léo and to … a version of herself on the outside world.

If stuck in Liz’s situation, most of us probably would’ve started where she ends up, asking MILO to redirect fresh air from outside tanks to her pod, but by the time she thinks to do that, her oxygen levels are down to just a few parts per thousand. At 3%, the CEP — or Charitable Euthanasia Protocol — kicks in, making the film’s outcome somewhat unclear. (Now, I don’t know a lot about suffocation, but I gather that it’s one of the most uncomfortable ways to die, and the movie never actually engages with what that would look or feel like.)

That’s because “Oxygen” isn’t a survival story in the conventional sense after all. Unlike “Buried,” wherein Ryan Reynolds struggles to escape a coffin with only a cigarette lighter and a low-battery cell phone to his name, the essence of “Oxygen” is more existential in nature. Liz must divine who — or more accurately, what — she is, and once that revelation comes to light, there’s a conscious choice to be made as to whether she wants to keep breathing at all.

This probably would have worked a lot better without the abstract glimpses of Liz’s pre-freeze life. Frankly, it was almost certainly more effective on the page, where those who awarded “Oxygen” its Black List status relied on their imaginations to fill in the gaps. Executed the way Aja approaches it, the plot holes become apparent. Some are big enough to push an asteroid through. But it’s an intriguing journey all the same, and — deep breath — by Netflix’s hit-and-miss standards, it’s better than such recent English-language offerings as “The Midnight Sky” and “Stowaway.” So there’s that.

Reviewed online, Palm Springs, May 3, 2021. Running time: 101 MIN. (Original title: “Oxygène”)

• Production: (France-U.S.) A Netflix release and presentation of a Getaway Films, in association with Echo Lake Entertainment. Producers: Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur, Noëmie Devide, Vincent Maraval, Brahim Chioua. Executive producers: James Engle, Adam Riback, Christie LeBlanc, Franck Khalfoun, Noomi Rapace, Laurence Clerc, Serge Catoire.
• Crew: Director: Alexandre Aja. Screenplay: Christie LeBlanc. Camera: Maxime Alexandre. Editor: Stéphane Roche. Music: Rob.
• With: Mélanie Laurent, Mathieu Amalric, Malik Zidi. (French dialogue)

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Summary A young woman (Mélanie Laurent) wakes up in a cryogenic pod. She doesn’t remember who she is or how she ended up there. As she’s running out of oxygen, she must rebuild her memory to find a way out of her nightmare.

Directed By : Alexandre Aja

Written By : Christie LeBlanc

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Mélanie Laurent

Elizabeth 'liz' hansen.

Mathieu Amalric

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Oxygen Is a Tense, Engrossing Sci-Fi Thriller

Alexandre Aja's Oxygen is a tense and surprisingly moving film, featuring a gripping performance from Mélanie Laurent.

Alexandre Aja is not a subtle filmmaker. The French director behind horror movies including High Tension , Piranha 3D and Horns doesn’t hold back from bombarding his audience with unsettling images or loudly stating the subtext of his films. Aja’s best movies, including 2019’s entertainingly ridiculous Crawl , take advantage of his in-your-face style, with bold premises and plenty of, well, high tension. That works even in the mostly single-location thriller Oxygen , in which Aja brings as much suspense and danger to a coffin-size enclosure as he did to the flooded, alligator-infested house in Crawl .

Aside from a handful of brief flashbacks, the entirety of Oxygen takes place inside a futuristic cryogenic pod, where Liz (Mélanie Laurent) wakes up prematurely from some sort of suspended animation. At first, she’s so disoriented that she doesn’t know her own name, only that persistent warnings indicate that the oxygen level in the pod is at 35 percent and falling. Thankfully, there’s an available medical AI known as MILO (voiced by Mathieu Amalric), which, in the tradition of many sci-fi AIs, is only superficially helpful, condescendingly responding to many of Liz’s queries with the assertion that it doesn’t know or can’t answer.

RELATED: Netflix's Stowaway Is Nail-Biting, Provocative Sci-Fi

So Liz is stuck figuring out who she is, where she is and why she was placed in the pod, which is typically used for medical purposes. Aja and screenwriter Christie LeBlanc parcel out information in strategic increments over the course of the 100-minute movie, all while the dwindling oxygen provides a constant sense of urgency. Via MILO, Liz is able to make some outside calls, first to the police and then to people she believes are connected to her personal life, although those calls are often dropped or unsuccessful at crucial moments.

She also pulls up photos and videos that help remind her of who she is, as Aja cuts to occasional flashes of Liz’s life with her husband (Malik Zidi). But new developments continue to arise that make Liz question whether her perceived memories are accurate, and the importance of discovering her true identity is nearly as strong as the importance of escaping from the pod before the oxygen runs out.

There are enough sci-fi trappings to lead to some obvious audience speculation about where Liz is and how she got there, but Aja doesn’t expand Oxygen ’s viewpoint until nearly the end (when he’s hampered by some weak special effects). MILO itself is just a projection of squiggly lines that look sort of like a jellyfish, on a screen above Liz’s head. The effectively minimalist production design creates a sense of some kind of future via just a handful of monitors and wires.

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Aja and cinematographer Maxime Alexandre vary the camera angles enough to keep things visually fresh, without resorting to too many distractingly elaborate trick shots. As Oxygen goes on, Aja and LeBlanc reveal more about Liz’s world, filling in the blanks about the circumstances in both her personal life and society at large that led to her being placed in the pod.

Eventually, that leads to a series of twists, which range from predictable to outlandish, and not everything in the plot adds up by the end. But Aja and Laurent make Liz’s predicament so compelling from moment to moment that there’s no time to reflect on narrative inconsistencies, and none of the potential plot holes hinder Oxygen ’s substantial entertainment value. Laurent gives a masterful performance that places the audience right alongside Liz for the entire running time, even when she’s reacting to especially absurd scenarios.

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Amalric brings a deadpan sense of humor to MILO, whether via cheerfully offering a “charitable euthanasia protocol” (that is, a lethal injection) when Liz’s chances of survival get too low, or warning her about possible criminal penalties for tampering with cryogenic pods when she attempts to break open the lid to escape. The other occasional voices on the phone give Laurent enough to react to that she’s not just giving her performance entirely solo, but her emotions and line deliveries are what really hold the viewer’s attention. She runs the gamut from scared to angry to righteous to wistful to hopeless, all while barely moving from the same prone position.

Oxygen owes a lot to various sci-fi disaster movies (the pod has a particularly terrifying needle-tipped arm that is reminiscent of the medical pod in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus ) as well as other single-person, single-location thrillers, including the 2010 Ryan Reynolds movie Buried (at one point, Liz speculates that she might have been buried alive). But Aja and LeBlanc effectively combine familiar elements in fresh ways, taking the time to develop the main character as she starts to remember details about herself. By the end, Oxygen is surprisingly moving, even as it fully embraces several movies’ worth of sci-fi nonsense .

Starring Mélanie Laurent, Mathieu Amalric and Malik Zidi, Oxygen premieres Wednesday, May 12 on Netflix .

KEEP READING: The Mitchells vs. The Machines is an Inventive Animated Sci-Fi Action/Comedy

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Common sense media reviewers.

Suspenseful sci-fi mystery has peril, language, violence.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Humans, regardless of gender, have the capacity to

Liz Hansen finds herself in an impossible situatio

The main character fears for her life the entire f

A married couple hugs and kisses in flashbacks. In

"F--king," "s--t," "a--hole," "hell," "damn." The

A woman smokes cigarettes. The pod repeatedly offe

Parents need to know that this French mystery could upset some viewers with sustained peril, graphic images, and its treatment of death and illness. Oxygen ( Oxygène ) also touches on broader concepts concerning the future of humankind and the ethics of scientific research and discovery that…

Positive Messages

Humans, regardless of gender, have the capacity to imagine other worlds and develop scientific marvels. Medical and scientific research must be guided by ethical boundaries. Nature can provide inspiration for scientific discovery. Profound love can exist between two people and help them transcend life's challenges.

Positive Role Models

Liz Hansen finds herself in an impossible situation and struggles to maintain a cool intellect to reach back to her own medical and scientific knowledge in order to help herself. She demonstrates cleverness and courage in facing the unknown. Some of what she discovers about herself surprises her.

Violence & Scariness

The main character fears for her life the entire film. She cries, screams, imagines herself suffocating, calls her loved ones to say good bye, says she doesn't want to die, and hallucinates rats all over her body. She is physically constrained inside the pod, which has the power to inject her with sedatives or lethal combinations and can give her electric shocks. She's told she’ll suffer extreme pain if she leaves the pod. She pulls bloodied tubes and long needles out of her body and inserts them back in. She flashes back to a loved one suffering lesions and coughing up blood due to an unnamed virus. She sees dead human bodies with holes blown through them. Laboratory rats are experimented on, tortured, and killed. Characters make dire prognoses on the future of the human race.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A married couple hugs and kisses in flashbacks. In one scene, the woman sits on the man's lap. In another, they appear to be naked in bed and caressing each other.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"F--king," "s--t," "a--hole," "hell," "damn." The film was reviewed in its original French with English subtitles.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A woman smokes cigarettes. The pod repeatedly offers Liz sedatives.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this French mystery could upset some viewers with sustained peril, graphic images, and its treatment of death and illness. Oxygen ( Oxygène ) also touches on broader concepts concerning the future of humankind and the ethics of scientific research and discovery that some viewers could find disconcerting. The main character, a doctor, demonstrates courage , intellect, and presence of mind in facing down her fears and unraveling the mystery of why she's woken up in a pod, who and where she is, and how she can save her own life before she runs out of oxygen. Her future is uncertain and she imagines herself suffocating. She's nearly stabbed by automated needles carrying sedatives or even lethal injections, receives repeated electric shocks, and pulls bloodied tubes and long needles out of her body and inserts them back in. She sees dead human bodies with holes blown through them. She remembers a loved one dying (including spitting up blood) from an unnamed virus. Laboratory rats are experimented on, tortured, and killed. In flashbacks, she and a man kiss and she smokes cigarettes. Language includes "f--king," "s--t," "a--hole," "hell," "damn." The film was reviewed in its original French with English subtitles. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In OXYGEN, a woman (Mélanie Laurent) awakes inside a futuristic cocoon. She quickly learns she's running out of oxygen. Unsure of where the pod is or how she got there, the woman begins asking questions of the pod's artificially intelligent operation system, known as MILO, for Medical Interface Liaison Operator (voiced by Mathieu Almaric). She's able to make some calls to the outside world and use MILO to search the internet and archives to uncover her own identity. She quickly realizes she doesn't know who she can trust or who is giving her helpful information. Meanwhile, her oxygen levels continue dropping.

Is It Any Good?

This French sci-fi film plays on elements of claustrophobia and suspense to deliver a compelling, though limited, tale. Oxygen takes a big risk by reducing its settings, outside of a few flashbacks, to a single, coffin-sized pod. The film banks on the emotion conveyed by star Mélanie Laurent, alone with a camera close on her face and interacting solely with other voices. Laurent does a convincing job transmitting fear, anger, shock, resignation, and more. For fans of the genre, viewers interested in the futuristic concepts here, and/or fans of Laurent, this will all be enough. For others, the film may feel too limited to maintain interest for the full hour and 40 minutes, even despite plot twists and a cleverly-controlled unspooling of the mystery surrounding the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the character and her unusual predicament.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the premise for Oxygen . What aspects of the story do you feel could be realistic? Which less so?

The film takes several twists and turns as Liz tries to discover who she is and where she is. Did you find the outcome predictable or did the film take you by surprise?

Have you watched any other movies that take place in one small setting like this one? Can you imagine how this movie was filmed? Where could you go for more information?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : May 12, 2021
• Cast : Melanie Laurent , Mathieu Amalric , Malik Zidi
• Director : Alexandre Aja
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Science Fiction
• Topics : STEM , Science and Nature
• Character Strengths : Courage
• Run time : 101 minutes
• MPAA rating : NR
• Last updated : February 17, 2023

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Oxygen Feels Like Something the Netflix Algorithm Vomited Up

Slosh around in the runoff of Netflix’s lesser releases and you’ll be reminded that the streaming service is as much a data company as an entertainment behemoth. Netflix runs on a schedule of marquee titles, like the Shondaland shows and David Fincher passion projects that are comparable to the output of other major networks and studios. But it is in the steady flow of smaller titles — some of them indie or international acquisitions, some clearly churned out on the cheap — that you can really feel the algorithm at work. Those lower-tier originals provide a (lightly dystopian) glimpse of what people click on when there’s nothing they might actively choose to watch: the meandering true-crime docuseries, the array of increasingly threadbare reality competition shows, the slapdash teen comedies, the high-concept, tight-focus sci-fi films — and man, are there a lot of the latter.

Some are set after an apocalypse: I Am Mother (in which Rose Byrne voices a sinister maternal robot), or IO (Margaret Qualley raises bees on an abandoned Earth), or How It Ends (Theo James crosses the country as it erupts into chaos). Some of them are set on ships: Orbiter 9 (about a woman who is part of a long-term space-travel experiment), or Stowaway (Anna Kendrick & Co. go to Mars), or The Cloverfield Paradox (a Paramount castoff). Most of these movies have minimal casts, which may or may not include name-brand stars. The George Clooney–directed The Midnight Sky was a higher-end production that nevertheless managed to be about both a guy living alone after an apocalypse and some people on a ship. These movies are all over the place in terms of quality and budget, but there is something to the regularity with which they are offered up, and their recurring elements, that becomes haunting. It’s as though the point isn’t a shared genre but something blunter and more calculated: Whose helmeted face can appear in a thumbnail next?

This week, it is actress and filmmaker Mélanie Laurent, whose face appears, in a minor variation, inside the glassed-in environs of a medical cryo unit instead of a suit. She plays Elizabeth Hansen, the main character in Oxygen and the only one who appears onscreen in anything other than a voice-over, a video clip, or a flashback. This French-language film is set far enough into the future that units like the one Elizabeth wakes up in at the start of the film are standard. What throws her into a panic is not that she has woken up swaddled in gauze within the confines of a high-tech casket but that she doesn’t know how she got there, how to get out, or who she is. That’s a lot of information for one immobilized woman to sort out in 90 minutes, especially with the ticking clock of her air running out because the unit sustained some sort of damage. Fortunately for her, the cryo unit comes equipped with some shaky Wi-Fi equivalent and an AI companion who is able to offer help when she asks but who is also inconveniently inclined to sedate and/or euthanize the “bioform” it has been entrusted with.

There’s a twist, though that is such a part of the formula for this type of offering that it can barely be called that. Then there’s another twist to make up for that fact. While both are pretty silly, the second one carries with it all kinds of philosophical implications a more thoughtful film would attempt to explore in some way. Oxygen is not, however, a very thoughtful film, and what should be enormous revelations are moved past easily, Christie LeBlanc’s script operating with the briskness of a project more focused on being a riff on Buried than giving any peripheral sense of a coherent future world. Oxygen was directed by Alexandre Aja, an alum of the New French Extreme who made a name for himself with the transgressive, nonsensical slasher High Tension and who more recently directed the unconscionably fun alligator-attack movie Crawl . His new film may be neither transgressive nor fun, but it is, at least, well crafted, the camera moving limberly to create a sense of visual momentum, even though its protagonist is trapped in a small space. Aja knows what sort of product he is turning out and does it ably, if without much excitement, as though understanding he is filling a hole in a lineup.

It’s actually Laurent, who is too classy to be here, who doesn’t entirely grasp the assignment. She keeps overreaching, giving her cutout character shows of realistic emotion that the film she is appearing in can’t support. It’s entirely plausible that someone in Elizabeth’s situation would have a burst of hysterics, stuck in a claustrophobic setting with death imminent and no rescue in sight. But in the context of Oxygen ’s wildly contrived premise, every moment the character takes to feel understandably upset is one in which she is not working to save herself. In pitting her all-too-human reactions against the mechanics of the screenplay, the film invites the viewer to be frustrated with its protagonist rather than feel for her. There’s no room in that cryo pod for character development, only for finding answers and a solution before the time runs out. Then it is on to the next streaming sci-fi B-movie, whatever it may be — the lid, or the helmet, or the protective gear popped open and left behind for someone else to put on.

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Oxygen Movie Review: A Claustrophobic Snooze Fest

• May 12, 2021

The Illuminerdi reviews the newest Netflix thriller Oxygen , directed by Alexandre Aja.

Alexandre Aja is back. The director returns with his latest project following the release of his 2019 film Crawl , which has grown in popularity, while ending up being pretty successful at the global box-office, he now returned to the small screen with Oxygen , a claustrophobic chamber play starring Mélanie Laurent, who is best known for her role in Quentin Tarantino’s acclaimed Inglorious Basterds .

While I wasn’t the biggest fan of his last film it did surprise me, because it’s hard to not like a film about alligators hunting humans in a overflooded town, I found the trailer for Oxygen quite intriguing. But I have to say, the film left me quite disappointed.

RELATED: THE KILLING OF TWO LOVERS REVIEW: A SIMPLE YET EFFECTIVE DRAMA

There aren’t many ways to tell a rich story when the movie basically only takes place in a futuristic healing pod, and the bland screenplay written by Christie LeBlanc doesn’t help. It’s LeBlanc’s first feature film screenplay and only her second in general. It ultimately lacked the emotional depth to draw me into the story. There are attempts to develop Liz’s (Mélanie Laurent) backstory, but some of them get glossed over for the sake of plot twists. While the rest of the film is filled with things we have seen a hundred times before, that’s not enough to make you feel invested.

Mélanie Laurent delivers a great performance and definitely tries her best with what she was given. Alexandre Aja’s directing is precise. He knows exactly how to capture the feeling of claustrophobia and although the story is shallow, it does have great looking visuals. One amazing transition near the end of the movie definitely stayed with me.

RELATED: CEREBRUM MOVIE REVIEW: FATHER-SON TALE A SOLID SLICE OF SCI-FI

As written above, Oxygen does have several plot twists and jump-scares. The plot twists are a double-edged sword, while all of them are quite surprising, every single one outdoes it’s predecessor in it’s ridiculousness. However, they also didn’t manage to keep my attention, nor get me invested.

While I think Oxygen will find its audience, I was really bored while watching it. Despite a great performance from Mélanie Laurent and some solid directing by Aja, ultimately the movie couldn’t hold it together.

Oxygen Synopsis

No escape, no memory, 90 minutes to live. Liz is running out of oxygen and time, in order to survive she must find a way to remember who she is. (Netflix)

Oxygen is globally available on Netflix. It is directed by Alexandre Aja and stars Mélanie Laurent, Mathieu Amalric and Malik Zidi. What do you all think? Are you planning to watch Oxygen ? Have you seen it already, if so how did you like it? Let’s discuss everything in the comments down below and on our Twitter .

KEEP READING: THE MITCHELLS VS THE MACHINES REVIEW: A SPECTACULAR ANIMATED JOY RIDE FULL OF HEART AND HUMOR

• Alexandre Aja , Mélanie Laurent , netflix , Oxygen , Review

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Review by Brian Eggert May 15, 2021

Alexandre Aja surprised everyone in 2019 with his creature feature Crawl , a simple thriller that pitted one woman against two alligators during a hurricane. His latest, Oxygen , offers a similarly claustrophobic scenario and the first French-language movie helmed by Aja since his 2006 breakout, High Tension . Like the minimalist Crawl , it proves Aja knows how to enliven and maneuver around a limited space, giving his performers room to shine. Here, Mélanie Laurent takes center stage as an unnamed, amnesiac woman who awakes in a cryogenic chamber and discovers her air will run out in about 100 minutes, the length of the movie. Accompanied only by the resident computer program named MILO (Mathieu Amalric), Laurent must squirm around a tight space and uncover secrets from her past that will lead to her survival. Best viewed as a showpiece for Laurent, star of Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Beginners (2011), Oxygen is a tense but unsatisfying experience.

Aja’s output since coming to Hollywood has been notably gory but usually disappointing, if only because his visual sense shows obvious skill—the scripts have been the problem. Crawl  was a step up from the French director’s gristly horror remakes, the defensible The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and the deplorable Piranha 3D (2010). Like Crawl , Oxygen shows that Aja can do more with less, and the script by Christie LeBlanc offers a single location for Laurent to explore, albeit not without twists and digressions. When Laurent wakes up, she frees herself from a thin membrane only to see that she has been strapped down inside a Cryoslide-brand pod with tubes and wires penetrating her body. She has no memory of who she is or how she got there, and MILO explains that her name is listed as Omicron-267. She must have been deathly sick and frozen in cryo-sleep, she assumes, while doctors figure out how to cure her. Unfortunately, only 34% of her oxygen reserves are left, and those will run out in just over an hour. 

The first third of Oxygen reminds us of Rodrigo Cortes’ Buried (2010), a superb thriller that never leaves the coffin in which Ryan Reynolds was buried. Aja remains with Laurent for much of this time, exploring the limitations of her situation and gizmos that will prove essential later on. Cinematographer Maxime Alexandre moves fluidly within the chamber, often employing POV shots to explore the space. Aja and Alexandre shoot Laurent from every conceivable angle, so the visuals never become stale. Much of this first section involves Laurent asking questions to MILO, who was clearly modeled after HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). However, it doesn’t have the quiet menace of HAL—it’s more of an unthinking, functionary system with limitations Laurent must learn to help herself out of her predicament. MILO answers what questions it can, but it doesn’t intentionally conceal information. It’s only threatening in the sense that it doggedly follows protocol and doesn’t help Laurent problem solve. 

Aja’s commitment to this sci-fi-infused buried alive situation breaks down before long. LeBlanc’s screenplay and editor Hervé Schneid find reasons to deviate from the single location and cramped interior world of the cryogenic pod, whether through flashes into the main character’s memory or the occasional hallucination. Laurent also has access to elaborate data files, videos, and images from her past—displayed in the hand-swiped format borrowed from Minority Report (2002)—that she uses as clues to find a way to escape. For example, when she watches a video of her former self or husband (Malik Zidi), Aja takes us into the video for some visual variety. Meanwhile, the recurring image of lab rats makes us wonder whether this is all some behavioral experiment. Indeed, Aja doesn’t commit to the trapped-in-a-pod setup as thoroughly as other filmmakers like Cortes have, and it feels like he’s conveniently bypassed making a more difficult film. 

Still, Oxygen is entertaining for its duration, though not without moments of questionable credibility for even casual sci-fi aficionados. And despite its loose devotion to the claustrophobic setting, it’s nonetheless an impressive example of slick filmmaking under pandemic conditions. Aja shot the film in July 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, and scheduling difficulties meant the originally cast leads, Anne Hathaway and then Noomi Rapace, had to back out. The finished product has landed on Netflix, where it plays in English on default, requiring the viewer to pause the movie and select French language and English subtitles for the original experience. There, it aligns with the standard disposable-but-watchable content usually featured on the streaming service. If there’s a reason to pass the time with Oxygen , it’s Laurent, who convincingly portrays a character going through psychological and physical strain, even if her performance is better than the movie that surrounds it.

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Oxygen movie review: Mélanie Laurent shines in Netflix’s fast-paced, thought-provoking thriller

Oxygen movie review: this melanie laurent starrer is a blisteringly fast-paced and entertaining thriller that plays with genre conventions to keep the viewer on their toes..

Oxygen movie cast: Mélanie Laurent, Mathieu Amalric, Malik Zidi Oxygen movie director: Alexandre Aja Oxygen movie rating: 4 stars

Oxygen, a new French thriller film directed by Alexandre Aja, is set almost wholly inside a cryogenic pod. Aja, who also directed 2019’s gripping horror thriller Crawl, seems to have come a long way since the days of Mirrors and Piranha 3D. His rise as an original filmmaker with a unique voice and style is testament to the fact that we can improve our craft.

A woman wakes up in a cryogenic pod not much bigger than a coffin. It looks medical in nature, leading her to think she must be sick and under some sort of treatment. But why can’t she remember what’s happened to her? Why she cannot remember even who she is? Is it memory loss?

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She does get flashes of seemingly unconnected memories, but little else. A person (she? or somebody else?) being wheeled to an ICU in a hospital corridor, a smiling man, and mice trying to find their way through a labyrinth. As she struggles to find the answers, the warning voice of AI regularly apprises her about the rapidly dwindling oxygen level.

Questions, questions, and more questions. And hardly anything in the way of answers.

If the setup sounds like a futuristic version of Ryan Reynolds-starrer 2012 film Buried, you are not far off the mark. The camera angles are similarly claustrophobic (although, there are admittedly limited ways you can photograph in such a cramped space), the plot likewise unravels through hints doled out slowly, the continually rising panic of the imprisoned person, optimism followed by crushing despair followed by optimism, and so on.

Oxygen cannot be called original in any sense of the word. It collects parts that are familiar to us from other movies but builds a product that is original and exciting. The pacing never lets up, except in moments when a new realisation, more terrifying than what came before, dawns upon the woman. In such cases, it pauses for effect, forcing the viewer to take it all in.

Oxygen also explores deeper concepts, and asks more uncomfortable questions than Buried ever dreamt of. It can be a more ambitious, high tech accompaniment in a double feature to Buried, which is more raw and focussed.

Mélanie Laurent, in the role of this lost woman without any idea of who, what and where she is, amazingly mercurial, showing a gamut of emotions as new revelations come her way. A movie like this, after all, would have been derailed before send off had not the actor been up to the mark. Laurent is impressive from start to finish.

Overall, Oxygen is a blisteringly fast-paced and entertaining thriller that plays with genre conventions to keep the viewer on their toes. Rare enough for the genre, it is intellectually stimulating as well.

Trigger warning (mild spoiler): The film repeatedly mentions the nosediving oxygen levels of the main character. There are scenes featuring a a new disease that is killing people. A person removes his face mask and we see blood on the inside. If you are disturbed or personally affected by the prevailing Covid-19 situation in the country, avoid watching this film.

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‘Oxygen’ Review: Mélanie Laurent Is Trapped in a Cryogenic Chamber in Silly, Well-Crafted Netflix Thriller

David ehrlich.

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A taut single-location Netflix thriller about a woman ( Mélanie Laurent ) who wakes up in a futuristic cryogenic chamber with no idea of who she is, why she’s there, or what she can to get out before she runs out of air, Alexandre Aja ’s “Oxygen” would seem to be the perfect COVID-era collaboration between the directors of “High Tension” and “ Breathe .” The rare high-concept movie that grows more compelling as it begins to unveil its mysteries, the film plays out as a frantic game of 200 questions that hinges on Laurent’s character desperately asking the chamber’s ultra-advanced A.I. companion (voiced by Mathieu Amalric ) to sift through social media and make a few last-ditch phone calls. Anything, she hopes, that might restore her memory or make contact with someone who can open the pod bay door before she asphyxiates to death.

But for all of the wild reveals that “Oxygen” has in store, most of which are predictable in broad strokes, there’s one minor little detail that Christie LeBlanc’s script never satisfyingly explains despite the fact that it’s baked into the deepest bedrock of this film: Why in hell would a cryogenic chamber ever come equipped with social media!? Surely the best part of suspended animation is the sweet release from the poison grip of posting. We’re talking about a device that has two modes — “Dead” and “Basically Dead” — and in the bizarre event that anyone ever woke up in one of these things, it’s hard to imagine that Siri would be the key to their salvation.

“Oxygen” is the sort of sly exercise in cinematic anxiety that demands a certain suspension of disbelief, and earns just enough of it to entertain. It’s also fair to say that the high-tech capabilities of the film’s setting are meant to make viewers forward and interrogate Amalric’s Medical Interface Liaison Operator (or MILO) with the same fervor that Omicron-267 does (to call Laurent’s character by the name that MILO gives her). It could even be argued that Omicron-267’s dire predicament is proof enough that cryogenic chambers should come with some kind of emergency system for interfacing with the outside world.

But when it comes to a movie that mistakes its premise for a story — a movie that mines most of its conflict and all of its drama from solving the “whats” and “whys” of its supine heroine’s situation — logistics are really the only thing we have to latch onto. With that kind of leak in the air supply, it’s only a matter of time before the whole enterprise goes braindead.

Fortunately, Aja knows how to fray nerves with the best of them, and “Oxygen” finds a number of clever ways to keep our attention focused on the film’s clear and present dangers. The actors are the most valuable asset in that regard, even if only one of them appears on screen. Laurent — delivering so much of her performance in extreme close-up that each of her nostrils deserves its own residual checks — is excellent as someone who essentially has an hour to figure out who she is if she has any hope for survival.

Amnesiac acting is a unique challenge, but Laurent’s flop-sweat fear is undercut by the intriguing sense that all of the answers Omicron needs are swimming around in her head somewhere, and she just needs to steady herself for long enough to fish them out. MILO is always calm and happy to be of assistance so long as Omicron asks him the right questions (Amalric strikes just the right balance between robot and rescue worker), but it doesn’t help that he’s constantly reminding her that she only has so much oxygen left.

For all of its illogical flourishes, the Cryosalide pod is a small wonder of production design, and Jean Rabasse deserves credit for crafting a fluorescent tomb so dynamic that “Oxygen” feels cinematic even within the narrow confines of its setting. From the moment Omicron wakes up — peeling away a synthetic cocoon from around her face and confronting the orbital screen above her, which pulses like a black hole displacing a starry patch of dark sky whenever MILO speaks — the pod feels like both a coffin and a womb in equal measure.

It’s fancy, and the fact that tampering with it supposedly violates European law raises a few eyebrows, but it’s also dehumanizing. That might have something to do with the lab rat motif that runs across the many hazy flashbacks in this restless film, each one of them puncturing its contained atmosphere and belying Aja’s unwillingness to convey the full claustrophobia of being stuck in a Jonny Ive death capsule. Or maybe it’s only natural for someone to feel like a piece of meat when they’re stuck inside a glorified freezer.

Either way, “Oxygen” is essentially an entire feature set inside the automated surgery table that Noomi Rapace uses to perform her own c-section in “Prometheus” (incidentally, Rapace was once tapped to star in this), and Aja works with cinematographer Maxime Alexandre and the rest of his crew to extrapolate bonafide action sequences from the Cryosalide’s basic functions. In a movie that often undercuts its own physical reality, “Oxygen” is never more intense than when Omicron is fighting off the articulating machine arm that tries to stick her with sedatives or yanking tubes out of her gut to stop MILO from giving her some even harder drugs.

Such visceral moments provide a sharp contrast to the phantom mystery that Omicrom is trying to solve in between, which is full of groan-worthy gaslighting and mind-boggling contrivances. LeBlanc’s script fills in almost every gap by the time it’s all said and done, but no movie about a person stuck in a tube should ever be this convoluted. There’s some potential fun to the fact that MILO holds all of the info that Omicron needs and is happy to give them to her so long as she asks the right questions; anyone who’s ever been frustrated by Siri’s literalness will be able to relate to Laurent’s frustration as she bangs her head against questions that are too abstract for an AI to answer.

Alas, “Oxygen” is too busy gasping for itself to embrace the Socratic method, and so there’s precious little payoff to the answers that it gradually teases out from MILO, and once the movie’s cards are on the table there isn’t any room left for it to play with them. Omicron barely has the energy required to post about what she’s learned along the way. While the light at the end of the tunnel actually illuminates a neat testament to the power of the survival instinct in all living things, Aja’s film loses so much air on the way to its grand finale that it barely has anything left to exhale by the time it’s over.

“Oxygen” will be available to stream on Netflix starting Wednesday, May 12.

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‘abigail’ review: dan stevens and melissa barrera in an exuberantly over-the-top vampire horror-comedy.

Criminals get more than they bargained for when they kidnap the daughter of an underworld figure in the new Radio Silence film featuring Alisha Weir in the title role.

By Frank Scheck

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Radio silence talk 'abigail,' their 'scream' exit and trying to make 'the shining' elevators jealous, giancarlo esposito says he was so broke he considered arranging his own murder.

It’s a deliciously silly conceit, and the filmmakers — whose previous hits include Ready or Not , 2022’s Scream and Scream VI — run with it, demonstrating such an exuberant commitment to the genre that the movie industry may be facing a shortage of fake blood.   

Once her true identity is horrifyingly discovered, the criminals respond exactly as most people would. “Okay, what do we know about vampires?” one of them asks, before they reasonably go looking for vampires, wooden stakes, etc. Unfortunately for them, Abigail proves more powerful and resourceful than most of the undead, revealing a particular talent for bargaining with her would-be captors before dispatching them. In the sort of little-girl voice that would be heartbreaking if you didn’t know she was capable of biting your head off.

Vampire movies are, of course, a dime a dozen (the most recent major studio example being The Last Voyage of the Demeter ), but few are as gleefully anarchic as this one. For instance, I can’t recall any others in which a pre-teen Nosferatu, clad in a tutu, dances a pas de deux with a headless corpse.

None of it would work as well as it does without Weir’s mesmerizing turn in the title role. The young actress, who previously demonstrated her virtuosity in the film version of Matilda the Musical , is so frightening and sardonically funny as the pint-sized bloodsucker that Bela Lugosi must be turning over in his grave from jealousy. Assuming, of course, that he’s still in it.

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'Breathe': What You Need to Know About Jennifer Hudson's First Action Movie

Jennifer Hudson and Milla Jovovich are in a fight for survival in this sci-fi action thriller.

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Does 'breathe' have a release date, is there a trailer for 'breathe', what is 'breathe' about, who stars in 'breathe', who is making breathe.

The upcoming sci-fi film, Breathe , seeks to provide the thrills you'd expect from a sci-fi thriller along with a deeper message. The action thriller hails from writer-director Stefon Bristol , a filmmaker known for previously making the Netflix sci-fi feature , See You Yesterday . Considering that his first full-length film in the same genre earned him great reception and acclaim, fans can expect that his upcoming film might also live up to that expectation.

Breathe is set in the near future, where air supply on the earth’s surface is scarce and survivors have to ration their oxygen use. In such a dilapidated New York City, Maya and her daughter, Zora, are forced to live in a bunker, where Maya’s scientist husband, Darius, is working on an oxygen generator that could save the world. One day when Darius doesn’t return after his trip to the earth’s surface, Maya and Zora start taking those trips themselves and encounter Tess, a stranger who seeks shelter and help from Maya by claiming to know Darius and his invention. Once the strangers are inside the bunker, things take a complete turn and Maya and Zora find themselves in a fierce battle of survival while on a limited oxygen supply, with the strangers revealing more than they let on. EGOT-winner Jennifer Hudson returns for her first acting role since Respect in 2021. Hudson stars as the lead, Maya, with Quvenzhané Wallis as her daughter, Zora, and Milla Jovovich as Tess.

Billed as an “edge-of-your-seat survival thriller” and exploring the terrifying but very real possibility of end-of-the-world , Breathe has the potential to be a gritty sci-fi action film. While you wait for the film to arrive this April, read on to find out everything we know so far about Breathe , including the plot, trailer, cast, and characters.

Breathe (2024)

Air-supply is scarce in the near future, forcing a mother and daughter to fight to survive when two strangers arrive desperate for an oxygenated haven.

Breathe is set for a limited theatrical release on Friday, April 26, 2024 , with simultaneous VOD and digital releases. The sci-fi film thriller’s premiere coincides with other long-awaited titles releasing on the same day, including Challengers starring Zendaya and Boy Kills World starring Bill Skarsgård .

Following an exclusive image released in March 2024, the first official trailer of Breathe gives us a peek into the heart-pounding thriller. Set in the future, the footage shows a mother-daughter duo in a desperate fight for survival on a post-apocalyptic Earth. The trailer opens with Maya’s husband and Zora’s father, Darius ( Common ), leaving their bunker, which will be the last time they see him. After he goes missing, and presumably dead, the women begin to leave their hideout, when they encounter two more survivors on the surface on one of their trips. Claiming to know about Darius and what could have possibly happened to him, one of the strangers, Tess, tries to get into Maya’s bunker. What seems to be a plea for help and trying to save the world, soon becomes a sinister agenda to seize the remaining oxygen. From here, the plot becomes tenser and darker with Maya and Zora’s desperate fight for survival against these two intruders and new strangers seeking them.

In addition to introducing the main characters of Hudson, Wallis, and Jovovich, the trailer also shows cut scenes featuring Sam Worthington and Raúl Castillo , who are also likely to join the fight for the oxygen generator. Most of the trailer is heavily action-packed with morbid frames of what appears to be a post-apocalyptic New York City, which helps to make the plot of a survival sci-fi thriller more convincing.

Breathe is a heart pounding thriller set in the future. After Earth is left uninhabitable due to lack of oxygen, a mother Maya (Jennifer Hudson) and her daughter Zora (Quvenzhané Wallis) are forced to live underground, with short trips to the surface only made possible by a coveted state of the art oxygen suit made by Maya’s husband, Darius, whom she presumes to be dead. When a mysterious couple arrives claiming to know Darius and his fate, Maya tentatively agrees to let them into their bunker but these visitors are not who they claim to be ensuing in mother and daughter fighting for survival. I

Bristol and his team have put together quite a diverse cast for the sci-fi action thriller, led by Dreamgirls star Jennifer Hudson and Resident Evil star Milla Jovovich. Hudson stars as Maya, a mother and survivor, who is trying to protect her daughter in their underground bunker after the lack of oxygen makes the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. Jovovich stars as Tess, a stranger trying to get Maya’s oxygen generator on the pretext of seeking shelter.

While Jovovich has a solid portfolio of starring in numerous sci-fi, action-thrillers, and survival films, like Ultraviolet and The Fourth Kind , her co-star, Hudson, is best known for her breakout role in Dreamgirls , followed by various roles in films like Chi-Raq , and The Secret Life of Bees , among three studio albums and numerous singles to her credit. Jovovich will be next seen in Brad Anderson ’s World Breaker .

Joining the leading cast members, Academy Award-nominee Quvenzhané Wallis stars as Maya and Darius’s teenage daughter, Zora, who initially believes that Tess has real intentions of fixing their oxygen generator and helping save the planet. But she is soon proven wrong and is forced to fight the strangers along with her mother. Wallis is best known for her breakthrough role in Beasts of the Southern Wild and became one of the youngest actors to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her performance. She also gained recognition for her roles in 12 Years a Slave , and the 2014 remake of Annie .

The cast also includes actor-rapper-musician Common, of Hell on Wheels fame, as Darius, an inventor, and Maya’s husband, who leaves their bunker one day and never returns, and is assumed to be dead after his oxygen ran out; Avatar franchise star Sam Worthington as Lucas; Class of ’09 alum Raúl Castillo as Micah, The Bold and The Beautiful alum Dan Martin as Mike. James Saito ( The Company You Keep ) and Kaliswa Brewster ( Billions ) are also credited for other supporting roles.

Breath hails from screenwriter-director Stefon Bristol in his second feature film project, which he directs from a Black List screenplay written by Doug Simon ( Brotherhood ). Before Breathe , fans might know the filmmaker from his directorial debut, See You Yesterday, also a sci-fi thriller, which was produced by Spike Lee . The film earned Bristol an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. Bristol also worked as an assistant to Lee, while filming BlacKkKlansman , produced several short films like Brutus , and also directed episodes of the television series, Payroll .

The upcoming sci-fi thriller is produced by Basil Iwanyk of the John Wick franchise fame, under his production banner, Thunder Road Films, along with Erica Lee . English indie artist and Florence & The Machine member, Isabella Summers composed the music for the film, with Felipe Vara de Rey , who previously collaborated with Bristol on See You Yesterday , serving as the cinematographer. Christian Mercuri and Ruzanna Kegeyan serve as executive producers for Capstone Studios, alongside David Haring , Esther Hornstein , and Will Flynn .

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Universal has struggled to in recent years to bring back its classic horror franchises like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, The Mummy, etc., attempts that were perhaps too literal. But thanks to the filmmaking collective known as Radio Silence they have, with Abigail , perhaps stumbled onto a way to keep the party going. In this case it is back to the immortal vampire story to end them all, Dracula, but here the bloodsucking title star is his 12-year-old daughter, not the infamous man himself who is reduced to a mere cameo.

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Meet Alisha Weir, The 14-Year-Old Breakout Star Of Universal's Vampire Flick 'Abigail'

Not to be confused with killer doll movies like Annabelle, this young girl is such a seemingly innocent budding ballerina it comes as a shock to see her whole-hog transformation into daddy’s little demon later in the film. Alisha Weir , morphing into the most terrifying child since Linda Blair got an Oscar nomination for doing it in 1973’s The Exorcist, is the title star who becomes the victim of a kidnapping plot by a group of badass, but kinda dumb, criminals enlisted by Lambert ( Giancarlo Esposito , in for a couple of scenes), who has been hired to bring them together by an unseen but fearsome crime boss in order to snatch Abigail and demand a $50 million ransom to be paid by her very wealthy father. The job goes relatively easy as they infiltrate the family mansion and steal her away to a deserted, gothic-like house while awaiting payment for the gig. But as they will soon learn this is no ordinary job. “I am so sorry for what is about to happen to you,” Abigail innocently says at one point to one of her clueless kidnappers.

Watching this unfold I kept thinking of Agatha Christie’s endlessly copied and remade And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little Indians ), and sure enough later in the movie the screenwriters, Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, do indeed reference that inspiration quite literally. Any casual moviegoer knows when you gather a group of strangers in a dilapidated mansion, one by one they are going to be goners. It is just a matter of time — and how. After a lot of bickering between them, plus the discovery that Abigail is no ordinary little ballerina, we start to see some imaginative, bloodcurdling sequences, and the movie earns it stripes in the genre; this is definitely hard-R horror. Of course, with Frank leading the resistance, they turn on each other in a bid to survive as Abigail shows she inherited the family genes and talent for sucking the blood out of their misbegotten plans while at the same time niftily shows off her balletic talents in dispensing with this crowd.

Although I have been getting weary of the same old tropes used in so many horror films of late, the endless parade of sequels doing basically the same thing, Abigail is actually a lot of fun, perhaps part of its inspiration coming for a lesser-known 1936 Universal classic, Dracula’s Daughter, but still a completely different storyline than that one. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (aka Radio Silence), who managed to freshen up the tired Scream franchise over the last two installments and are also responsible for the original Ready Or Not, show a real flair for injecting humor and horror in equal doses into the proceedings and really keep this thing building to the inevitable crescendo required of such a premise. Short of giving this material to a genius like Guillermo del Toro, they do a fine job in bringing it all to life, helped enormously by Brian Tyler’s sensational Grand Guignol-style score.

You can see why Stevens, an otherwise serious actor, might want to take on a gonzo role like Frank as he completely devours it without a worry that too much is, uh, too much. Barrera, who worked with the directors on Scream, shows she also has the chops for this sort of thing. Newton is pure fun, as is Durand who gets some of the best lines. Cloud has the real nutso character but sadly is out of the film much too early, though it’s enough to shows the potential the Euphoria star had for creating some out-there characters. Gone way too soon. The film is dedicated to him.

Producers are William Sherak, James Vanderbilt, Paul Neinstein, Tripp Vinson and Chad Villella (the latter also part of Radio Silence).

Title: Abigail Distributor: Universal Release date: April 19, 2024 Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett Screenwriters: Stephen Shields and Guy Busick Cast: Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Will Catlett, Kevin Durand, Angus Cloud, Alisha Weir, Giancarlo Esposito, Matthew Goode Rating: R Running time: 1 hr 49 min

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