Oxygen ★★

Motherhood, militarism, and moral ambiguity collide in Netalie Braun‘s disquieting drama Oxygen. Prior to its run at Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival in the Best of Festivals section, the film took the top prize at the Jerusalem Film Festival, causing a stir for its supposedly anti-war message. This, however, is both complicated and compromised by the murky motivations of its protective protagonist who is egoistic at best and an outright sociopath at worst. Distinctly and disquietingly, at least festival audiences seem prone to heroify primary school teacher and single mother Anat (Dana Ivgy) who is determined to do everything to prevent her son from going to war. Refusing simplistic binaries, Braun makes her main adversary not state officials or the army apparatus, but her son himself. 

Vivacious young Ido (Ben Sultan) can’t wait to return to his unit from leave and – likely all too aware of his mother’s paranoid fear for him – actually deceives Anat into believing all discharges had been suspended. To him, being in the military is doing what everyone does, as military service is obligatory in Israel for men and women alike, standing with his friends and doing what he has been through is “right”. Ironically, Ido is the product of an ideological indoctrination system which Anat herself facilitates. The very first scene shows a school performance that she herself put together and staged. Here, the children from her class play the soldiers they once will almost inevitably become. 

As the daughter of the traumatized veteran commander Yaakov (Marek Rozenbaum), Anat is squeezed between two generations of military men. Yet, she is far from being a pacifist and doesn’t seem to have any agenda whatsoever apart from her own. She doesn’t care about the genocide in Gaza, war crimes, or Palestinians. Neither does Anat recognize the occupied Palestinians as human equals, nor does she realize the Israeli government’s actions as wrong. Apparently, she’s just fine with the war, as long as it doesn’t involve anyone she considers her own. Though an easy-to-miss scene at a beach has her glimpse at a Palestinian mother whose caring actions mirror her own, with a flicker of empathy, this empathy is purely based on their shared motherhood. 

The constant sublimation of motherhood as both self-sacrificing and uncompromising is in itself highly problematic, especially considering the historical intertwining of motherhood myths with nationalist and fascist ideas. Anat’s irrational possessiveness of her son, whom she both objectifies and infantilizes, is underlined by imagined images of her cradling an infant Ido in her arms. Horrified at the idea of having him return maimed like the young soldiers she watches at a rehabilitation center, or not return at all, the soft-spoken protagonist resorts to radical means to prevent her son from going to the front. As begging and bribing don’t succeed, Anat comes up with a highly allegorical and hard-to-believe plan against his wishes. 

Anat’s egotistical manipulation and betrayal of trust appear as an almost saintly ideal of motherhood, even though they shatter the symbiotic mother-son bond. Paradoxically, Anat herself resorts to violence towards Ido to achieve her goal. Bolstered by Ivgy’s powerful performance, her self-centered dialectic is mutually appalling, pitiful, and scary. Its ambivalence arises from its framing as a loving, ethical act. The narrative’s strength lies in its psychological dynamics and tension building on emotional stakes: the painful collapse of relationships, recurrent trauma, and parental dependency. As a harsh reflection of personal and collective responsibility, the porous border between the individual and the system, as well as the contradictions and conflicts of parental bonds, Oxygen is ultimately as hypnotic as it is hypocritical.