Awaiting the arrival of Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, Netflix is ​​offering subscribers in May a second original movie premiere with Oxygen, Thriller Derito Da Alexandre Aja (Trumpets, Creeps) who sees credibility always being the ultimate protagonist Melanie Laurent. We are in an indefinite future and suddenly a woman, Elizabeth Hansen, you wake up in a refrigerated capsule. She is wrapped in a polymer cocoon and connected to medical machines, but when she returns from a sleep-inducing sleep, she has no recollection of her past, and she suffers from severe amnesia. She doesn’t know where she is and why she ended up in a refrigerated capsule, but most of all, she doesn’t know who she is.

To help him alone Interface of the capsule, MILO (Matthew Amalric), who follows Elizabeth’s directions and requests, tries to reconstruct the past with her and everything that led her to this situation. However, the more serious problem is another: the oxygen is constantly running low and is ready to run out in a few hours, so a woman must find a way to escape before it’s too late.

All cliches of this kind

Alexander Aja is not new to these tense and anxious film projects, in fact, we can say that he built his career around her. Let’s think of the hills have eyes but especially Crawling – Intrappolati ea the ninth life of Luis Drax. He has always loved a variety of genres aimed at horror, survival, and science fiction, and ultimately this one Oxygen is a bit like the sum total of his inspirations And his cinematic interests, given that, in a fictional film of one hour and fifty minutes duration, he managed to combine all the aforementioned genres into one “package”.
Looking at nicknames like Buried – BuriedAga chooses never to leave the refrigerated Elizabeth capsule to create a deep sense of anguish, loneliness and claustrophobia, moving only inside and exclusively and reducing the dynamic of the footage to Focus functionally on close-ups and stylistic ideas Suitable for the situation.

In such a context, the director knows how to categorize the ingenuity one by one that gives a formal and cinematic feel to the film, which nevertheless seems not to explode to its fullest potential. Followed above all The semi-river scenario by Christy LeBlanc, Strong sense of progressive and growth of the story that It makes many cliches of this kind in terms of full content.

It deals marginally with the various issues of the hour and does so by referring to the needs related to the story chosen for narration, which are problematic in the rhythm and repetition of situations, which are inevitably reduced. Flashbacks don’t help either, Because the bulk refers to the capsule AI video, MILO, the classic science fiction assistant programmed to interact and support the device’s host.

Although rich in plot twists, in a succession of nearly invasive discoveries, Oxygen It is a title that does not fully delight and does not give real surprises, Except for Laurent’s explanation, Who, carried on his shoulders for the duration of the film, tries to “move” to his best acting potential in a situation in which actions are reduced to the bone and above all, word, emotion and expression prevail over the rest.

Nevertheless, the categorical upward momentum lifts the somewhat fading fortunes of the project, which in any case remains repressive and documentary justifiable down to the millimeter over the somewhat calculated and anticipated development of history. Not the best Aja movieOutdoorsy, preferred, able to swing with more fun in her style.