SHORT RIDE TO HELL

Wes is back: A few years after wrapping up the Scream-franchise, Wes Craven tries to make a comeback with a thriller on a meagre budget. Does he deliver a failure or will he leave movie-goers craving (excuse the cheap pun) for more?

Lisa and Jackson are sitting at the airport bar, waiting for the Red Eye, an inland flight to Miami. They have just met for the first time in their lives, but immediately form a connection. There is something in their conversation that goes beyond mere sympathy. When she finds that he coincidentally has booked the seat next to her, a spark shows in her eyes: Is this just happenstance, or is it fate...?

What begins so harmless that it could very well be a romantic comedy about love at first sight soon develops into a nightmare when Lisa realizes that the nice young man connects so well because he has been watching her for the past weeks. He is a killer hired to force her to perform a very specific task: to make sure that Lisa, who is a minor hotel manager, changes the room assignment for William Keefe, the deputy secretary of Homeland Security – so that he can be murdered more easily. The leverage is not primarily Lisa's own life, but that of her father, who sits at home in front of the TV, unsuspecting...

Wes Craven, whose breakout hit Scream accomplished the unusual feat of being an exciting "slasher" flick and an accomplished parody of that particular genre at the same time, returns to the big scream, pardon, screen with the small, but very fine thriller Red Eye. Since there is no point in rambling for hours about a movie that is only 85 minutes long, I will stick to the basics.

The brevity is probably Red Eye's big strength. This movie is lean and mean, and despite completely staying away from any action for about two thirds, manages to develop a wonderfully suspenseful atmosphere of inescapable claustrophobia, its dark images alternating between smooth silence and the menacing shaking of turbulence on the plane. Watching Lisa's attempts to find the way out of a cage that has no door makes the movie a real seat grabber, and the quick, effective style in which the events are presented ensures that there is not a minute of boredom to be found.

If there is something to be criticised, it is certainly the end. For the final stage, the story descends a bit too much into overused genre-stereotypes, making it almost childishly easy to predict the next image Wes Craven will put on the screen. Nevertheless, even the last segment manages to keep up the pace, turning Red Eye into an exciting, compelling and visually well-crafted thriller – definitely the best this year has produced so far. Recommended for all fans of the genre.