Thriller Thursdays: Oxygen - Leaves you breathless

In our weekly column, Thriller Thursdays, we recommend specially-curated thrillers that’ll send a familiar chill down your spine.:

What holds you together when you find yourself completely alone, with no recollection of who you are, where you are and how you got there? When the only connection with the past is jagged flashes of seemingly disconnected images. Oxygen, a gripping sci-fi thriller is an exposition on the search for identity.

A cocooned figure awakens, entombed in a cryogenic pod, connected all over with electrical connectors and wrapped in a cocoon and starts to tear the body cover, forcefully at first, then despairingly. A woman is revealed, she is completely strapped, and is lying flat inside a metal tomb, which is alive with electronic indicators and an advanced AI called MILO, short for Medical Interface Liaison Officer (and who continuously reminds us of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey). But more debilitatingly, she just has 31% of oxygen left.

MILO is an ocean of knowledge and help, but an extremely bureaucratic one. It requires authorisations and access passwords, and has inbuilt necessities to start survival procedures even when not requested upon. But for the woman, MILO is her sole mirror, window, guide, and assistant. Through him, she finds her name to be Elizabeth Hansen (Mélanie Laurent).

Elizabeth is barraged by images of happier times, of a loving man, of working together, of hearing him play the piano, of the seaand she despairs of knowing more and of reclaiming at least the truth of those vestiges which would give her own sense of identity, belonging and reference. Through her growing interaction with MILO and her clever usage of semantics and logic, she is able to delve deeper into the mystery of her presence in the pod. The more she gets to know, the deeper her anguish is.

Embedded in this breathlessly suspenseful film are questions of the nature of truth, of the premise on which lies the answer of what we are, the nature of experience, the importance of the tactile memory, and the truths of what constitutes truth. As it is, one of the most frightening experiences for a human would be isolation and entrapment and the realisation that there might not be a way out alive. And director Alexandre Aja plays on this as he slowly moves toward the existential questions, even as he gives genuinely frightening moments. One with the automated injection needle and another where the woman thinks she is pulling out a cord and pulls a rat's tail instead are unexpected and alive with menace.

But as the minutes tick by and the revelations steadily come to light, Elizabeth's despairing reconciliation with demise begins its construct, and her desperation fills every bit of the physical screen.

The narrative spends time examining the effects of the unknown whilst in isolation without any sense of what and why, and where. MILO informs Elizabeth that her identity has been erased in lieu of a name - Omicron 267. As she discovers her name and truths about herself, she makes sure that, near the end, she renames herself, Liz. In that one symbolic moment, which in that isolation might not have any meaning, lies the first step to reclamation, which is so great a symbol of synthesis and regeneration.

The art direction and photography are cold, steely, claustrophobic, and immersive, letting the audience know the perils of confined isolation, with its concomitant questions of what is the meaning of a person's existence when no one is there.

Laurent is incredible as Elizabeth Hansen, her face a universe of changeable emotions, and the film would have been lesser if not for her. And Mathieu Amalric is all gravitas as MILO's voice, frustrating, impervious but all-knowing, holding inside him all answers but revealing truths as information almost only when Elizabeth is ready to hear them.

The finest sci-fi stories and films are the ones that explore the intricacies of technologies and talk about how they affect us, humans, in a granular way. And in that particularity lies the seed of what would affect the entire human race. And in throwing questions of great import by merely the device of putting a woman in an enclosed pod, director Alexandre Aja has made a film that leaves you deeply moved and, well, breathless.

Trivia:

1. Anne Hathaway was the original choice of the protagonist of the film. Later she was replaced by Noomi Rapace, who finally stayed on as Executive Producer. Finally, when director Aja came on board, Mélanie Laurent was offered the role.
2. Mélanie Laurent is a French actress. She is the winner of two César Awards (the French Oscars). In the English-speaking world, she is best known for her roles in Inglourious Basterds, Now You See Me, and 6 Underground.
3. Director Alexandre Aja has directed several horror thrillers, including Crawl, The Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors, among others. He is a member of the Splat Pack, a term coined by film historian Alan Jones for a set of directors who make 'brutally-violent horror films'.

Watch Oxygen here.

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Sunil Bhandari, a published poet and host of the podcast ‘Uncut Poetry’)