Saturday, July 10, 2021

Oxygen (2021)

IMDb plot summary: A woman wakes in a cryogenic chamber with no recollection of how she got 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. Starring Mélanie Laurent, Mathieu Amalric, Malik Zidi, and Laura Boujenah.

This film draws an immediate comparison to the Ryan Reynolds film Buried from 2010, but while Buried felt like it was primarily leaning on the horror/thriller part of its genre, here it feels about equal parts mystery and thriller. There's obviously a pressing danger throughout the story, but the mystery of who this woman is and how she got here takes up just as much bandwidth, and ultimately, it's the unraveling of that mystery that really made this film work for me most. She's a good protagonist for this genre in that she makes smart, logical decisions while also clearly portraying how this traumatic situation is affecting her. Overall, definitely one I'd recommend.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Oxygen > Fahrenheit 451
Oxygen > The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Oxygen < Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
Oxygen < Contagion
Oxygen < Beetlejuice
Oxygen < Whale Rider
Oxygen > Mister Roberts
Oxygen > Rounders
Oxygen > Mr. Brooks
Oxygen > The Paper
Oxygen > The African Queen
Oxygen > This Boy's Life
Final spot: #796 out of 3398, or 77%.

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