Oxygen

Director: Alexandre Aja
Year Released: 2021
Rating: 1.5

Full body panic attack time: a woman (Mélanie Laurent) wakes up in a cryogenic chamber with various tubes attached to her body and no recollection as to her real identity and with her oxygen levels at a critical level, so she has to piece together what limited memories she has to try to escape.  This sort of one-person show has been done before successfully (for example, Buried with Ryan Reynolds), and while the initial set-up is fascinating - as she tries to logically think her way out of a dilemma (making phone calls, using the Internet to conduct searches, talking to the on-board computer voiced by Mathieu Amalric) - it's the opposite of efficiently told, drawing itself out far longer than the material calls for (and inviting too many deeper questions about the situation).  Aja tries to gussy it up by putting his camera in every conceivable position but he needed to call Siri and trim this boy down substantially.  The happy ending, for some reason, feels like a let-down: I guess clones deserve love and respect too (unlike in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go).