Wes Craven is back after the cursed Cursed. This film, which ranks up with A Nightmare on Elm Street for the production of tension, reminds us that he's one of the real masters of horror. He helped reinvent the horror genre twice—with Nightmare in the early 1980s and with Scream in the early 1990s—and he easily makes the transition from slasher fare to nail-biting horror.

Lisa (Rachel McAdams), a harried hotel employee, is late for a flight home to Miami that turns out to be delayed by bad weather. She's having a bad day anyway: her grandma died, and she's on her way back from the funeral. She's supposed to meet her father Joe (Brian Cox), but she'll be delayed long past his bedtime. While at the airport, she bumps again and again into a handsome, charming young man. Jackson (Cillian Murphy) is a great catch: he's interested in her but not pushy, and he has a great ice-breaker where he can guess what she's going to order. When the plane finally boards, it turns out that they're sitting together. It all seems like a setup for a romantic comedy.

Except for one problem: Jackson's part of a band of terrorists who want to kill the new deputy secretary of Homeland Security (Jack Scalia). The secretary is staying at Lisa's hotel, and, as we already know, she has the power to pull strings and get people into different rooms. The terrorists want the secretary to move from his usual room into one more accessible to sea-to-air missiles. If Lisa doesn't call the hotel and get them to change the reservation, Jackson's associate will kill her father.

The film makes remarkably good use of a very limited set, the interior of an airplane. Much of the film is made up of intimate, enormous closeups of Murphy and McAdams, emphasizing how cramped planes are and also how powerless passengers are. It's a perversely effective conflation of two big fears, one serious and one just annoying, that go with plane travel: fear of terrorism, and fear of ending up next to an obnoxious fellow passenger.

Murphy, the star of the superb 28 Days Later and probably the best things about Batman Begins (he’s the Scarecrow), is a natural bad guy. He’s undoubtedly charming, and his distinctive good looks help emphasize the meet-cute romantic-comedy feel of the airport sequence. Indeed, I thought this film's first teaser trailer, which cuts off right before Murphy reveals his true intentions, was one of the best trailers of recent years. It had you offguard, wondering what kind of movie this really was. When Murphy flips on his bad-guy mode, he doesn’t have to rely on sneering or grimacing—there’s just something slightly wrong about him, in his ice-blue eyes, in the edge of his voice, that works better than any amount of posturing. He feels like the real thing. And McAdams, lately of Wedding Crashers, does a great job as the admittedly archetypal Woman in Peril with Hidden Reserves.

Craven ratchets up the tension on the plane to an almost unbearable level, and the way in which he transitions from the plane to the ground elicited screams from the audience. Once on the ground, it turns into a more conventional structure, a cat-and-mouse chase through a house that veers closer to Craven's slasher-movie background—but don't forget that he's really good at this, so he still had me on the edge of my seat.

Of course none of it holds up to post-viewing examination, but most thrillers don't. Think about it: if Lisa had simply started screaming on the plane, how long would it have taken for the crew to alert the hotel and send cops to Lisa's dad's house? And what are the odds that Jackson's cell phone battery would have been that low? You'd think terrorists would plan things out a little better. Also, Lisa's scathing question, "What, you don't have a backup plan?" is a good one—shouldn't they have one? But in the moment, when you're sitting in the plane watching Lisa struggle with the task that's been placed in her lap, you're literally on the edge of your seat. Audience members yelled at the screen at several points, and by the end I found myself joining them.