Knock! Knock! Mélanie Laurent would like to get out of her cryogenic chamber in “Oxygen” – Netflix
- Oxygen by Alexandre Aja, Wednesday on Netflix, sees Mélanie Laurent wakes up locked in a cryogenic chamber, the nightmare of any claustrophobic.
- Several genre films start from the same premise: buried alive in Buried, prisoners of mortal pieces in Cube, on a caving trip in The Descent…
- Elevator, car trunk, submarine, catacombs… Everyone has their own confined space.
In Oxygen by Alexandre Aja, available Wednesday on Netflix, Mélanie Laurent wakes up in a cryogenic chamber. She can’t get out, barely budges, and will soon run out of oxygen. A pure high concept genre film, and the nightmare of everything claustrophobic. The cinema likes to play with the fears of spectators, with a little cathartic effect, and has therefore already locked up its heroes and heroines. Elevator, catacombs, submarine, car trunk or the vastness of space, almost everything has happened there. 20 minutes offers a small selection of claustrophobic films for deconfined audiences.
“Buried”, “Kill Bill”… The Buried Alive
Who says claustrophobic film, necessarily says Buried, the feature film that everyone thinks of when it comes to a character locked up, stuck in a few square meters. As Oxygen. Director Rodrigo Cortés buries Ryan Reynolds six feet underground in a coffin, armed only with a phone and a lighter. A tour de force, and staging, which never lets go of the spectator, and allows the actor to deliver a real one man show and to impose itself among the greats.
Buried is not, however, the first to bury his hero alive, like Quentin Tarantino with Uma Thurman during a cult scene from Kill Bill 2, in fact a tribute to the Italian horror film Fears by Lucio Fulci from 1980. We can even go back even further, in 1962, with the aptly named The Buried Alive by Roger Corman, adapted by Edgar Allan Poe, where an aristocrat’s obsession with death leads him alive to the grave.
In the wake of Buried, and difficult to know if it is chance or opportunism, the direct-to-DVD film Kidnapping sees Stephen Dorff as a secret agent being locked in a car trunk by terrorists who want to know where the President of the United States is hidden. Unless … This is one of the springs of these films, fear comes as much from the inside and its danger (the inability to get out, the lack of air, etc.) as from the outside and its mystery (who locked them up? why?). Films rely entirely on this off-screen, such as The Divide and 10 Cloverfield Lane, where people wake up or take refuge in a cellar, while the apocalypse is unfolding outside. Or not.
“The Elevator”, “Cube”, “Panic Room” … Choose your favorite confined space
If they are less cramped than a coffin or a chest, other confined spaces have inspired filmmakers such as the elevator with The elevator by Dick Mass and Devil produced by M. Night Shyamalan, the bank distributor with ATM by the screenwriter of Buried, the car buried under the snow with Centrigrade, the panic room with … well Panic Room by David Fincher. But claustrophobia is never the only threat, how if that wasn’t enough, with the intervention of demons, masked killers or burglars.
In the next Meander, on May 26 in theaters, a young woman wakes up in a tube, like an air vent, and must constantly move forward and avoid traps to survive. We then think of Cube, a reference in the field with its labyrinth of communicating rooms and as many deadly traps. A escape game before the hour.
“The Descent”, “Catacombs”, “Gravity”… Locked in, out, in space?
The submarine is also an essential figure in this cinema, because it is doubly claustrophobic. You feel cramped and you can’t go out. Because you are at the bottom of the ocean! Of Boat by Wolfang Petersen at Wolf song, to name but a few, submarine films are very good at building up the pressure. But the ocean can be sufficient on its own, or almost, as in Abyss by James Cameron, 47 Meters Down and his shark cage, or the future and French Tea Deep house and his haunted house at the bottom of an artificial lake, June 30 in dark rooms.
Nature also succeeds very well on its own in making us claustrophobic, even if some seek it a little anyway like the heroines of the masterpiece The Descent, whose moments of caving are more freaking out than monster attacks, or amateurs of urbex in two films on the Parisian catacombs but directed by Americans.
But isn’t the ultimate claustrophobic movie the one where the hero or heroine is locked… outside? Let’s even go there frankly: in space! Alien resumed the codes of the claustrophobic film with Ripley locked with a Xenomorph in a space freighter, but what about Gravity and Sandra Bullock locked up there alone, in silence, nothingness? At the other end of the spectrum, it is impossible not to evoke the fascinating and metaphysical Johnny goes to war of Dalton Trumbo from 1971 with his soldier wounded in the war, amputated of four limbs, deprived of his senses but conscious, and therefore locked in his own body.