BEFORE: More adventures in air travel tonight. Linking from "Red Eye", Brian Cox was also in "Troy" with Sean Bean (last seen in "Goldeneye").
THE PLOT: A bereaved woman and her daughter are flying home from Berlin to America. At 30,000 feet the child vanishes and nobody admits she was ever on that plane.
AFTER: This ties in nicely with the last few films, because it's another one of those "claustrophobic" films set in a confined space (if you can call a jumbo jet a "confined space"...) and also because it's about grief and loss. The main character is already mourning her recently-dead husband, so that puts her in the same category as the kid from "Extremely Loud" and the character from "Reign Over Me".
When the woman's daughter disappears on the plane, which at first seems impossible or incredibly unlikely, one possibility is that the woman's grief has affected her sanity - either she imagined her daughter coming with her, or perhaps imagined her own daughter's entire existence as some kind of coping mechanism. (the "Fight Club" theory).
The opposing theory is that something more malicious has happened, someone in a position of power has not only kidnapped the daughter but gone to extreme measures to cover up not only the daughter's location but her existence as well - so essentially there's a choice between two very unlikely scenarios, and in fact the woman's insanity starts to look like the more likely of the two.
No spoilers here, I'm just happy that I was able to record the film and dub it to DVD without looking that closely at it, and maintaining the secrecy. But if you like twisty thrillers, this is a good one. Toss in a little post-9/11 paranoia with some Arab passengers on board, and an inside look at the functioning of a jet airliner (I just have no idea how authentic this was - does a jumbo jet really have a supercomputer on board?) and a non-invasive running time, and that mostly adds up to a win, as long as you can overlook the similarities to Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes".
Nitpick points are plentiful, but nothing I can formulate without spoilers. But they're out there...
Also starring Jodie Foster (last seen in "The Brave One"), Peter Sarsgaard (last seen in "Green Lantern"), John Benjamin Hickey (last seen in "Pitch Perfect"), Erika Christensen, Greta Scacchi (last seen in "Jefferson in Paris"), Matt Bomer (last seen in "In Time"), Kate Beahan.
RATING: 6 out of 10 beverage carts
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