GENSOCIAL
We have a brand new teaser trailer for Oxygen. This one comes from Netflix, serving as just one of the many original movies the streaming service has coming our way this year. The company is putting out at least one new movie a week, which is a lot more than any other major service on the market. In this case, we have a French-language thriller from director Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, High Tension), serving as his follow-up to the 2019 alligator creature feature Crawl. It stars Melanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds, Now You See Me) in what looks to be a tense and highly-contained ride.
The trailer opens with a close-up of someone waking up, rather surprised, and confused as to where they are. We then find Mélanie Laurent inside of a tube of some kind, surrounded by screens, not unlike the cryotubes seen in the Alien franchise. She is quick to find that the oxygen in this tank is running out and, inconveniently, she has no way out. Despite the minimalist nature of the movie, a compelling mystery is woven into the trailer that adds a little depth beyond this woman trying to get herself out of a horrifying situation. It looks a bit like the Ryan Reynolds movie Buried, but with a sci-fi bend.
Alexandre Aja is directing from a script by Christie Leblanc (How to Make a Reality Star). Vincent Maraval, Brahim Chioua, Noëmie Devide and Gregory Levasseur are on board as producers alongside Aja. The cast also includes Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Quantum of Solace) and Malik Zidi (Water Drops on Burning Rocks, Made in France).
Oxygen centers on a young woman who wakes up in a medical cryo unit. She doesn’t remember who she is or how she ended up locked away in a box roughly the size of a coffin. As she begins to run out of oxygen, she must rebuild her memory to find a way out of this nightmare.
Netflix has been exploring international features more in recent years. They came very close to winning a Best Picture Oscar with Roma and one of the company’s most-viewed original movies to date is The Platform, a Spanish-language horror movie that performed surprisingly well when it debuted last year. Plus, the German-language series Dark did quite well through three seasons and was met with a great deal of praise. So we are likely to see more movies like Oxygen in the future.
Even as movie theaters are expected to get back on their feet by summer, Netflix is continuing to capitalize on people staying home. They have more than 70 original movies arriving this year alone, which is a truly staggering amount of content. Not to mention expensive. But those deep pockets helped get them to 200 million subscribers worldwide. And they need to keep the originals flowing to keep those subscribers happy. Oxygen arrives May 12 on the Netflix streaming service. Be sure to check out the trailer for yourself.
