FEAR TAKES FLIGHT.
Hotel desk manager Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) takes the red-eye flight to Miami; little does she know that the nice guy (Cillian Murphy) in the next seat has very special plans for her. This short, simple but exciting thriller feels like an excellent episode of The Twilight Zone; it could be argued that Wes Craven is the modern equivalent of Hitchcock, at least in this case. The game between the two main characters is tense and leads to unpredictable, explosive events. McAdams is very engaging as the chosen victim and Murphy is an expert at going from nice guy to ice-cold murderer.
2005-U.S. 85 min. Color. Widescreen. Produced by Chris Bender, Marianne Maddalena. Directed by Wes Craven. Screenplay: Carl Ellsworth. Cast: Rachel McAdams (Lisa Reisert), Cillian Murphy (Jackson Rippner), Brian Cox (Joe Reisert), Jayma Mays, Jack Scalia, Robert Pine.
Trivia: Allegedly written for Sean Penn and Robin Wright Penn.
Last word: “We certainly didn’t get United Airlines to enthusiastically let us use their planes or anything like that. We had to make up an airline. It was tricky with airports but not impossible. We got three airports to allow us to shoot which I thought was really terrific because in that case, they were physically opening themselves up to 100 people coming in with all sorts of tools. It was funny because they would check everybody for something carried, like the grips would say, ‘I have five knives in my kit. What are they thinking? If I wanted to kill somebody, I’d kill somebody…'” (Craven, IGN)
