Red Eye (2005)

Wes Craven spent the summer of 2005 making a tight, economical thriller about a hotel manager trapped at thirty thousand feet, and the culture has largely declined to make anything of it. Red Eye runs ninety minutes and spends most of them on two people in adjacent seats. There is no message to extract. There is a man who wants a phone call placed and a woman who would prefer not to place it. The film understands that a locked room can be a row of seats, and that the most frightening thing available is a polite voice explaining the terms.

Rachel McAdams carries the picture as Lisa, and the screenplay grants her a history that reads as empowerment in retrospect: she survived an attack two years earlier and swore never to be a victim again. That vow pays off with a ballpoint pen to the throat, an act of self-defense staged with a grim practicality that a studio today would likely greenlight only after a conversation about it. The arc is present. It is also entirely subtextual, folded into a genre exercise instead of announced from a pulpit. The cast around her is white and unremarked upon, which is to say the film was made in 2005 and behaves accordingly.

What is absent proves more instructive than what is there. No character pauses the hijacking to explain the moral architecture of the moment. No villain turns out to be a corporation. The antagonist is a domestic terrorist with a missile and a schedule, and his motives are never audited for political content. Craven, a director who never needed permission to be efficient, delivers suspense and exits. It remains one of his better efforts, and it remains a B movie, which is not an insult. The classification is straightforward: a thriller that predates the era when thrillers were expected to file paperwork.