Red Eye Film Review: Lightning in a Bottle

Wes Craven’s Red Eye is a tight, relentless thriller that uses its fierce performances and single location to its advantage.

Red Eye tells the story of a young woman named Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams), who boards a flight to Miami to return to work after visiting her family on the west coast. When her flight is delayed, she strikes up a conversation with another solo traveller, Jackson (Cillian Murphy), who seems eager to listen to her life story. But when the pair realize they’re seated together on the flight, Jackson reveals his secret: he’s a terrorist, and he needs Lisa’s help to assassinate a high-profile politician.

What’s so effective about Red Eye is that, for the most part, the story is told exclusively through dialogue between McAdams’ and Murphy’s characters, who spend the entire runtime stuck on a plane. It’s a story of political espionage and domestic terrorism, but Craven rarely allows himself to step outside the confines of this regular commercial flight. This works for one sole reason: McAdams and Murphy are endlessly watchable in these high-stakes roles, and their on-screen rapport is so much more engaging than any of the over-the-top politics going on outside. Craven’s decision to stick so closely with these characters turns what easily could have been a by-the-book action movie into a more compelling, personal character drama.

What Red Eye lacks in the bloody violence and frightening scares that audiences had come to expect from Craven’s filmography, it makes up for in sheer, impenetrable tension. Unlike Scream or A Nightmare on Elm Street, this isn’t a film that aims to incite fear in the viewer, but rather keep them on the edge of their seats for as long as possible with anticipation. Red Eye achieves this through tight, claustrophobic visuals, a narrative that continually ups the stakes at every turn, and subtle foreshadowing that keeps the film moving steadily towards its satisfying conclusion.

There are certain aspects of Red Eye that haven’t aged perfectly – namely its signature early 2000s melodrama – but it’s a very welcome change from the more intense and self-serious horror flicks that Wes Craven had been making in the years prior. Conversely, this is a very self-aware project that never gets bogged down in the complexities of its story, but rather has fun with its unique premise and makes it very easy for audiences to do the same.

Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy’s characters in Red Eye are rarely mentioned among their best roles, but that shouldn’t be the case. The film may be sillier and more far-fetched than projects like Oppenheimer and About Time, with which the actors are more frequently associated, but their work is equally impressive. McAdams captures just enough raw vulnerability to immediately get the audience on her side, while Murphy balances the perfect level of composed insanity that makes him such an engaging villain.

Ultimately, Red Eye may not be Wes Craven’s most technically impressive film, or his most narratively memorable, but it’s a very solid thriller that manages to avoid many of the major pitfalls of this genre. It embraces its unrealistic story with a self-aware charm, leaning heavily into the melodrama in a way that feels fun and unbothered. An underrated entry in Craven’s filmography, but not one that should be overlooked. 

Red Eye is now available to watch globally on digital and on demand, and on DVD & Blu-Ray.

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