DIRECTOR EXCLUSIVE
Life And Breath
Alexandre Aja thinks inside the box in high-concept survival thriller Oxygen
→ SURVIVAL IS A throughline in Alexandre Aja’s filmography. From The Hills Have Eyes to Piranha 3D to 2019’s gator-infested Crawl, he clearly relishes putting his protagonists through the wringer – and himself, too, it turns out.
“I’ve always been attracted to those movies that allow you to think about who you are, and what you will do in that type of terrible scenario,” he tells Red Alert. “Always imagining or expecting the worst. I like those movies where I feel I’m living something that hopefully I will never really live myself.”
Oxygen, his latest, is built on a suitably life-threatening hook. In the near future, a woman wakes in a cryogenic pod. Trapped in what feels like a technological coffin, she has no memory of who she is or how she got there, and a rapidly diminishing supply of air…