The Child Vanishes

Chapter 3 concentrates on the subgenre of the “aero-thriller” through an engagement with the compositional problem, distinctive to air travel, of spatial enclosure. Yet as the post-9/11 conspiracy film Flightplan (2005) and other cinematic and televisual examples (such as Jaume Collet-Serra’s Non-Stop [2014] and Jordan Peele’s “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” [2019]) illustrate, the limit-space occupied by passengers is, at the same time, rendered extensive due to a projection of technological innovation (the plane becomes a “super”-plane). These factors, forming a continual contraction-expansion dynamic, impact the scenic dimensions as well as the temporality of suspense, against the backdrop of which Flightplan introduces missing-person and mistaken-identity plot turns. These devices of the thriller speak to the variant sociality, the specific type of social alienation, found among subjects in flight.