flightplan

A variation on the locked room mystery, the movie depicts what happens after Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) boards a fictional Aalto Airlines flight from Berlin to New York with her six-year-old daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston). After falling asleep and waking up about three hours into the flight, Kyle discovers her daughter is missing. She searches the plane for her daughter, but is then told that according to the passenger manifest her daughter never boarded the flight. None of her fellow passengers remember having seen her either.

A search of the plane fails to find Julia. The captain (Sean Bean) refuses to allow the cargo hold to be searched because he is afraid that the searchers could be hurt if the freight shifts because of turbulence. Both the captain and the other crew members suspect that Kyle is unhinged by her husband's recent death, and has imagined bringing her daughter aboard the aircraft. She has no boarding pass stub for her daughter, and, according to the gate at the Berlin airport, no one by her daughter's name was on the manifest.

In addition, the flight attendant who took the passenger headcount never saw anyone in the seat that Julia was supposed to have occupied. Faced with the crew's increasing skepticism regarding her daughter's existence, Kyle becomes more and more desperate, frantic, and erratic in her behavior, continuing to insist that she brought her daughter on board the aircraft with her and that Julia must be somewhere inside it.

Kyle herself begins to doubt that she brought her daughter, but becomes confident she is not imagining things when she notices the heart Julia had earlier fingered on the window by her seat.