Flight 7500 (2014)

Flight 7500 concerns a Boeing 747 bound for Tokyo that encounters turbulence, a corpse, and a death doll, in roughly that order of escalating inconvenience. Takashi Shimizu, who once made a small apartment building in Tokyo feel like the worst address in the world, here applies his talents to a confined cabin full of strangers who are, as the final act reveals, already dead. The reveal lands with the soft thud of a screenplay that showed its hand early and spent the remainder of its runtime tidying up after itself.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a desert. The cast is stocked with recognizable faces, among them Jamie Chung and Christian Serratos, but their presence is demographic furniture, arranged without comment and dismissed without ceremony. There is a pregnancy test, a subplot about a flight attendant sleeping with the married captain, and a breakup that resolves itself at cruising altitude, none of which is examined through any lens of gender politics. The women suffer and vanish alongside the men, which is, in its way, admirably egalitarian. No character lectures anyone about anything. The film's only sustained argument is that clinging to earthly attachments will get you pulled into an overhead bin.

The result is a horror film that wants nothing from its audience beyond a mild unease and perhaps a nap. It is not a bad film so much as an undernourished one, a ninety-minute exercise in cabin pressure and quiet resignation. There is no ideology here, no sermon, no corrective offered to the culture at large. Just smoke, turbulence, and a wooden box that should have stayed closed. We grade it accordingly, with the faint respect owed to any picture that resists the urge to improve us.