Just a Breath Away (2018)

Paris is engulfed by a lethal mist that pools at street level, and a family retreats upward. That is the entirety of the premise, and Daniel Roby's film has the discipline to leave it there. Mathieu and Anna are scientists, their daughter Sarah lives in a sealed capsule because of a rare autoimmune syndrome, and the next ninety minutes consist of oxygen canisters, battery life, and stairwells. It is a survival thriller built on logistics. Nobody pauses to explain what the audience ought to think about any of it.

That restraint is worth cataloguing. Anna is a competent co-protagonist with a laboratory and a plan, though the film never converts her into an argument. The supporting cast is a standard French-Canadian ensemble, and the presence of a child actor of North African descent in the final act is incidental, not a statement. Sarah's condition functions as a mechanism for the plot, not as a window onto identity. The mist itself is geological, a natural disaster with no environmental grievance attached. Race goes unmentioned. Class goes unmentioned. The film has no interest in the moral instruction business.

What remains is craft, of a modest and slightly melancholy kind. The film kills Anna, allows an elderly couple to resign themselves to death, and lets Mathieu shoot a policeman for oxygen, all without commentary. Its reception was tepid, fifty percent on the aggregator, though it collected eight Canadian Screen Award nominations, which suggests the industry found more to admire than the critics did. We classify it as a lean genre object from a less anxious moment. It asks nothing of us but attention, and it earns a portion of that.