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The New Yorker
12 September 2005
By David Denby
In 1967, the Italian director Elio Petri made a film called We Still Kill the Old Way. Well, the veteran American director Wes Craven still kills the old way, too. His dandy little thriller Red Eye, which is exactly eighty-five minutes long, has been made with classical technique and bravura skill, and it's leaving moviegoers in a rare state of satisfaction. (The absence of people whizzing through the air on green wings or deliquescing into corpses and coming back to life again has been much appreciated.) When the beautiful young hotel manager Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) gets picked up at the Dallas airport by a handsome fellow (Cillian Murphy) who jokes about his name—Jackson Rippner, as in Jack the Ripper—we're alerted to danger by his overfriendly manner, and by the joke itself, which would seem to be unnecessary if he weren't trying to reassure Lisa of his harmlessness. But the screenwriter, Carl Ellsworth, doesn't tell us too much. He knows that for the audience the pleasure of this kind of filmmaking lies in taking the bait and then being slowly but inexorably reeled in. Cillian Murphy, who has angelic looks that can turn sinister, is one of the most elegantly seductive monsters in recent movies, and Rachel McAdams has large, doll-like features that mask a surprising amount of calculation and rage. As Murphy sits down next to her on an airplane, the movie turns into a complicated duel that depends on precise observation of physical detail and moment-by-moment continuity so closely calibrated that it's impossible to find a wasted shot or an exaggerated emotion. Craven, who made A Nightmare on Elm Street and the Scream series, has a slightly off-center wit. As Murphy and McAdams are engaged in a death struggle in the airplane's toilet, a huffy stewardess disapproves of what she takes to be an inappropriate use of a public facility. The joke is almost worthy of Hitchcock.
