Breathtaking

 

OXYGEN (B-minus) - A woman awakes from a cryogenic coma, apparently in a space capsule, and must reason with a HAL-like computer to help rescue her before her oxygen runs out. Melanie Laurent puts on a hell of a one-woman show in her cramped pod, as she races against time to both survive and crack the mystery of her circumstance.

The screenplay, by newcomer Christie LeBlanc, is pretty clever, and its logic is internally consistent throughout, a neat trick. The biggest problem is how LeBlanc and director Alexandre Aja, in this futuristic excursion, are weighted down by the old-fashioned Bechdel test. Their heroine, Liz, is obsessed with reconnecting with her beloved "husband," whom she sees flashes of as she strains to access her memory banks and hunts for clues to who she is and how she can survive. In the end, this is mostly a cheesy soul-mate story about the power of love and companionship.

If it were not for that heavy-handed hetero-normative shmaltz, "Oxygen" could have been a fascinating sci-fi brain teaser. Liz is a resourceful researcher of cryogenics who seems to have been shot by her own gun. Her interaction with AI assistant MILO (Mathieu Amalric) provides snappy dialogue and narrative development; he is just helpful enough to tease Liz toward the next hint or revelation but never satisfying enough to help her fully unravel the full mystery. 

Fortunately, this zips by in a pretty neat 100 minutes, pushed along by the ominous countdown clock monitoring Liz's dwindling oxygen levels. And the ending is smart and, again, logically consistent. If only the anachronistic rom-com tropes weren't such a distraction.

THE WORLD TO COME (C) - Like clockwork, it's another lesbian love story set in the time before the invention of electricity. But this one is a lukewarm mess, with a mismatched cast and a laborious narrative structure.

Katherine Waterston almost makes this worth watching as Abigail, a dutiful but melancholic farm wife in pre-Civil War upstate New York. Waterston offers a mask of heartbreak and longing following the death of a daughter, and her inner emotional glacier is slowly melted when she meets a neighbor, Tallie (Vanessa Kirby), another matrimonial drudge-worker. As the women visit each other, a bond develops. Slowly. 

Problems abound here. The lethargic pace is frustrating. The men mumble and the women whisper (I eventually engaged the subtitles). The characters seems like four unrelated archetypes rather than organic people in a believable setting. The husbands are portrayed by a pair of mopey duds -- Casey Affleck (with Abigail) and Christopher Abbott (Tallie's menacing mate). The screenplay is written from the perspective of two men (and directed by Mona Fastvold) trying to imagine the inner thoughts of two women from two centuries ago. And the main device they use is extensive voice-overs, mainly Abigail narrating her diary entries but also the ol' corny letter-writing dictation. The leaden line readings, a sop to the era, nearly grind things to a halt at various times.

Waterston brings a haunting ache to the story, but Kirby comes off as way too modern, with both her look and her attitude (and, frankly, her fluffy flowing locks). Affleck's character shows a glimmer of understanding of his wife's attraction to another woman, and while that nuance is interesting, it also is rather far-fetched. Fastvold holds off on showing love scenes and then deftly underplays them, saving the most explicit one for close to the end, as she intercuts it with another scene of tragedy. But in the end, this slog mostly sits on the screen, inert, leaving the viewer as frustrated as the women born in the wrong time.