Jodie Foster's face fills the frame, her taut cheeks, blue eyes and pale skin almost incandescent. Foster's face is the most frequently used effect in Flightplan, and it repays attention: No matter how it appears, in crisp shadow and bright illumination, her face reveals complex ranges of emotion and thought.

In Robert Schwentke's crudely plotted thriller about suddenly widowed mother Kyle Pratt, Foster is practical and self-contained in her grief. She first appears in middream, walking with her dead husband through Berlin's snowy streets, wishing that she might stop him from ascending to their rooftop — from which he fell or jumped. The action begins as Kyle and 6-year-old Julia (Marlene Lawston) are transporting his body back to the States aboard a giant Airbus that Kyle helped design. The other passengers fiddle and make noise (especially the family in the seats just in front of Kyle's), the flight attendants — including "new kid" Fiona (Erika Christensen) and very precise Stephanie (Kate Beahan) — strap themselves in for takeoff.

The thriller kicks in when Kyle wakes hours later to find Julia missing. Though she does her best to stay calm, she's increasingly unnerved by the crew's suggestions, first that the girl must be somewhere and she's panicking needlessly, and next, that the girl doesn't exist at all. Her name is not on the manifest and there's no record of her boarding. Worse, no one recalls seeing her. Kyle keeps her focus: "The problem is not that I'm anxious. The problem is that my daughter's missing and nobody can tell me where she is."

Kyle briefly thinks an Arab passenger (Assaf Cohen) who looks at her funny is involved (inviting fellow passengers to act out their own racism and disquiet). This leap of imagination leads to more skepticism. And Foster's face does momentarily reveal a recognizable and awesome fear: What if these folks are right? What if, as a conveniently available therapist (Greta Scacchi) suggests, Kyle has succumbed to overwhelming grief, and imagined Julia lived when really she died with her father?

But the movie only asks you to observe this fear, not share it. Though the plane is huge and the technical areas are gleamingly futuristic, you share Kyle's sense of oppressive judgment. The shrink's smarmy affect is only underlined when air marshal Gene Carson (Peter Sarsgaard) comes up with some completely inappropriate niggling: "Your husband's death is starting to make a lot more sense to me — a couple more hours and I'm ready to jump." Right. With outrageous motivation like that, you're ready for the silly plot turns that turn Kyle into Action Mom.

Flightplan Directed by Robert Schwentke A Buena Vista release Opens Friday at area theaters