One Way Flight
2016 · 15m · Reino Unido
Directed by Joan Paüls
Genres: drama, mystery, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Daniela boards a long Colombia-to-London flight with her baby, whose presence awakens the interest of her seatmate Karen and flight attendant Alice, who begin to suspect she is hiding something.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The thriller machinery here is competent but predictable—two passengers zeroing in on a mother's secrets, the paranoia ratchets up, and we're supposed to gasp at the reveal. It's Hitchcock-adjacent without the nerve to actually subvert the form, which leaves me wanting something weirder.
Paüls constructs this with real formal precision: the confined space of the cabin, the escalating social friction between strangers, the way editing and sound design tighten the screws without melodrama—this is economical thriller craft that knows its lineage and executes it with control.
The film hinges on a single choice: keeping the camera mostly on the bystanders' faces as they construct their suspicion, rather than cutting away to confirm or deny what they think—that restraint, that withholding of objective truth, is what makes the paranoia feel genuine.