Weekend Watch: Oxygen And The Woman In The Window
Two heroines trapped inside...
Image Credit: Netflix
Welcome to the latest edition of Weekend Watch, in which I recommend (or occasionally warn against) movies or TV shows I’ve been checking out. This week, Mélanie Laurent is trapped in a medical mystery and Amy Adams suffers agoraphobia. Follow James on Twitter: @jamwhite
It’s a linked duo of movies this week, as two women confront mysteries from the confines of a particular space. Only one of the films surrounding them works. First up, we have Oxygen, a science-fiction thriller from director Alexandre Aja, a man whose career I’ve been hot and cold on. Some of his output I’ve enjoyed: 2003’s High Tension and 2013’s Hornsparticular, and he effectively remade The Hills Have Eyes, while others, such as 2019 alligator thriller Crawl, left me bored. This latest offering is a crafty little drama, one that uses both the constricted nature of the set and the acting abilities of Mélanie Laurent to full effect.
The story finds Laurent’s main character rudely awakened to find herself trapped in a medical pod, a calm, mechanical voice informing her that the oxygen level in the chamber is slowly – and, later, not-so-slowly – dropping. Scrambling to figure out how she got there, who put her in this situation, and, oh yes, who exactly she is anyway, she’s thrust into a desperate struggle to dig up details. Working from Christie LeBlanc’s script, Aja and cinematographer Maxime Alexandre dial up the tension superbly, keeping your interest despite the cramped conditions, relieved only occasionally by the memories stirred in Elizabeth Hansen (as Laurent learns she’s named, though I’ll go no further than that) and the brief flashes of information that the malfunctioning cryochamber’s system is able to offer.
Laurent carries the brunt of the performance here; as with Ryan Reynolds in Buried, she has to convey many emotions speaking to only one or two other people via an occasionally working communication system. And then there’s M.I.L.O. (Mathieu Amalric), the pod’s dispassionate operating voice. (Of one slightly annoying note, the dubbing over the original French languages with less compelling voices on this Netflix release occasionally robs moments of their power, especially given how well Laurent and Amalric sound if you switch to the French version). Together, they drive the story along and keep you guessing. If you think you have it figured out immediately, prepare to think again.
While this is primarily science fiction, Aja also lets his horror side slip in occasionally like a knife between the ribs, some body nastiness, a few rats, and screeching soundtrack moments never feeling cheesy or unearned. He wants to keep you off guard, have you rooting for Elizabeth to discover the truth behind her situation, even if you know in the back of your mind it can’t be anything good.
Watching someone confined inside, gasping for oxygen might appear an odd choice for entertainment after we’ve all spent so much time inside, worriedly checking oxygen levels for symptoms of a disease, but Oxygen will transport you to a very different situation, and keep that pulse rate high.
Oxygen is on Netflix now.
Image Credit: Netflix
The same, unfortunately, truly cannot be said of The Woman In The Window, which boasts a bigger budget and cast, but is a real let-down. That might not be particularly surprising given its troubled history, which starts with an adaptation from a 2018 novel (written by literary editor Daniel Mallory under the pseudonym AJ Finn, who has been dogged by controversy after fabricating details of his past and some health struggles). Scripted by Tracy Letts (who also appears in the film as a therapist), it was directed by Joe Wright for 20th Century Fox but ended up delayed after test audiences were confused by several story points. Rewrites and re-shoots followed, and it was then caught in the double whammy of Disney acquiring Fox and the pandemic. Sold off to Netflix, it has now appeared with little ceremony, and it’s honestly not hard to see why.
Wright is a director who has had some very high highs, including Atonement, Hanna and Darkest Hour, and a few very low lows (Pan). The Woman In The Window falls squarely into the latter territory. Amy Adams stars as Dr. Anna Fox, a child psychologist who suffers from severe anxiety and agoraphobia, and spends her days wandering her expansive (yet still claustrophobic) Manhattan brownstone, obsessively watching the life she cannot partake in out of her window and drinking to excess while on medication. She’s separated from her husband (Anthony Mackie), who has custody of their daughter, and she mostly has her basement tenant David (Wyatt Russell) and her cat Punch for company. Anna’s life is an unhappy one, filled with watching old movies when she’s not spying on the street. When new neighbours move in across the road, she’s drawn into a mystery when she sees the wife (Julianne Moore) murdered by her seemingly abusive husband (Oldman, reuniting with Wright and perhaps wishing he hadn’t even given the Oscar success of Darkest Hour).
Muddled and slow at the same time, the film fails to find a thrill level and is largely content to plod around the house with Adams who, it must be admitted, at least brings something more to Anna than a mopey main character. This is trying so hard to be Hitchcockian (by way of David Fincher) that you can see the flop sweat on its brow. Danny Elfman, usually so reliable as a composer, here lets his Bernard Herrmann flag fly, ratcheting up the strings to ludicrous and occasionally hilarious effect.
Like Adams, the rest of the cast do what they can with what they’re given, but it really isn’t much, twists and turns popping up like they’re being checked off a list and the whole far less than the sum of its parts. Some movies look like canny grabs by streaming services spotting hidden gems that studios let slip through their fingers. This is more like garbage disposal.
If you really need a mystery thriller that wants to be Rear Window (or even previous knock-off Disturbia) but ends up more a lesser take on book-to-film fodder including The Girl On The Train, you might find some diversion here. Yet there are far better examples of the genre out there, and 1944’s Gaslight already exists.
The Woman In The Window is on Netflix now.