Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster of "Panic Room") boards an empty Aalto-Aire plane for a flight to New York from Berlin. In the cargo hold is the casket containing her recently deceased husband. With Kyle is her distraught six-year-old daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston), who quietly curls up on the floor under the window seat as the plane begins to fill and the flight attendant takes a head count.

A man in a nearby seat tries to strike up a conversation with Kyle. She and her daughter retreat to empty rows of seats in the rear, where they stretch out and both fall asleep. When Kyle wakes up Julia is missing and the film lurches into a decidedly higher gear. After her cursory search comes up empty, Kyle insists on seeing the flight Captain (Sean Bean of "The Island"). He will only go so far to look for someone that, according to their records, is not on board and no one remembers seeing. After all, he has 400 other passengers on board that he is concerned about.

When Kyle becomes insistent, and causes unrest among the passengers (which is not tolerated in this age of heightened security), undercover Air Marshall Gene Carson (Peter Sarsgaard of "The Skeleton Key") is asked to keep Kyle restrained. He’s the man who attempted to get chummy with her before.

We discover (through flashbacks) that Kyle is extremely upset, and on medication, because her husband’s death is considered a suicide. But is it? Her daughter’s name does not appear on the manifest. So, was Julia really onboard? The night before Kyle thinks that she saw two olive skin men spying on her in her apartment. Are they the same two Arab men she accuses on the plane?

Kyle is a propulsion engineer who helped design the new wide body, double-deck plane they are flying in. She knows all the rivets and recesses that could serve as hiding places. And she is determined to find her child.

"Flightplan" is not a smooth cinematic ride. Nearly transparent foreshadowing keeps this from being a top-notch thriller. The villain in the piece is not as chilling as Cillian Murphy in "Red Eye." The final scene with the Arab passengers at the end plays out too neatly and takes forgiveness to a level that is hard to swallow. [See Paradise Now]

Overall, the film does have you on the edge of your seat at times and Jodie Foster brings a clear-eyed intensity to her performance that is always welcome.