After her husbands dies in an accident, Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) and her six year-old daughter Julia are traveling back to New York from Berlin. Three hours into the flight Julia has disappeared, no one remembers seeing her in the plane and there is no record of her boarding the flight.
Kyle is a devastated mother who’s just trying to take her husband’s body back to the United States. When she wakes up and realises her daughter is missing she can’t stay calm, she panics and, given the recent event she had to deal with, everyone on the plane starts questioning her sanity.
She is arrested by a sky marshal (Peter Sarsgaard) at some point, he pushes her against a wall so he can cuff her but he doesn’t really hurt her by doing so, plus it was the only way he could do that since she was in shock and the other passengers were starting to get upset about the whole situation. There’s also a scene where she hurts herself by falling over one of the flight’s seats but no one pushes her, she trips because she’s panicking.
In this Robert Schwentke thriller, Kyle is never taken seriously by the other passengers and everyone thinks she’s just a traumatised woman but besides that no one attacks her physically, no one tries to hurt her, not even when everyone starts thinking that she could be a terrorist.