More People Should Watch This Taut Netflix Survival Thriller

Stuck within the infinite Netflix scroll? Searching for one thing to truly watch, not partially watch whilst you’re in your telephone? Open that Netflix search question and kind “Oxygen.”

Otherwise often called Oxygène, this 2021 French survival thriller stars Mélanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds) as a girl trapped in a claustrophobic pod with a dwindling provide of oxygen. Her efficiency mixed with the evocative rating and requisite twists tethered me to her dire plight for each one in all its 101 minutes.

Oxygen builds pressure proper from the off. Our protagonist, wrapped in unusual materials whereas mendacity on her again, good points consciousness. It’s darkish, and a blinking purple mild illuminates her battle to interrupt via her creepy second pores and skin. She emerges gasping for air.

Soon, the viewers is aware of just a few extra issues about this blue-eye, blonde-haired girl. She’s locked in a cryogenic pod and can ultimately be unable to breathe. She’s additionally missing nearly any useful reminiscence about who she is and the way she ended up there.

Talking her via her horrible circumstance is an AI known as MILO (for “Medical Interface Liaison Operator”), which supplies off irritating vibes akin to an automatic telephone menu. MILO is cussed about how Laurent’s character phrases questions, however it does help her in some methods. With the assistance/non-help of MILO, she desperately seeks a method out of her tight spot.  

More perceptive viewers might really feel in a different way, however I started the movie as flabbergasted as Laurent’s character about what might have landed her in that pod. The solutions come within the type of huge twists. 

The thriller retains viewers invested, as does the spacious sci-fi rating and pressing tempo.

Then there’s Laurent’s character. A film fully a couple of girl caught in a futuristic field must have a fairly compelling girl in that field. I felt her terror, desperation and anger as she contended with the likelihood of a horrible loss of life and different extremely unfair features of her predicament. 

There are a few issues I did not love about this movie. For occasion, Laurent’s trapped character makes no try in any respect to relax and preserve her life assist (which is, after all, straightforward for this viewer sitting in a snug chair to be irritated about). 

Throughout the movie, Laurent’s character sees fragments of reminiscences that do not appear to assist her a lot past one scene near the very finish. And that scene is unceremonious — she wants to search out one thing within the current and immediately simply remembers it from the previous.

But these points did not dampen my viewing expertise an excessive amount of. In all, Oxygen did the one factor I at all times need a flick to do: It gripped me from the protagonist’s first strained breath all over to the top. I’d strap again in and watch it yet again.