Jodie Foster, the queen of thrillers does it once again in “Flightplan.” Here she plays Kyle, a jet propulsion engineer who has recently been widowed and is traveling with Julia, her 6-year-old daughter from Berlin to New York.

Upon waking up from a nap, Jodie Foster finds her daughter missing. She immediately asks the flight crew to seat every passenger and announce that there’s a missing child.

When no one reports the child being seen, she demands the captain, Rich (Sean Bean) and sky marshal Carson (Peter Sarsgaard), along with the crew, to search every cabin bin and the access point beneath and above the plane.

When Julia isn’t found, everybody begins to believe that Kyle is delusional. Julia’s name isn’t on the passenger manifest, the departure gate at Berlin has no record of her checking in and the morgue reports says she was killed along with her father. With options running out, she acts on impulse and uses her knowledge of the plane to conduct her own search.

Don’t worry there’s a twist, which of course I won’t reveal, but it’s one interesting way to move on with the plot but it seemed a little desperate. I will tell you though, that it starts with an intriguing premise on the psychological genre but ends up somewhere over the rainbow.

Foster, in a role similar to “Panic Room,” is always able to hold back her emotions just an inch. If she wanted to, she could follow through. She has mastered the facial expressions. For example, she could be smiling but you still see fear or doubt in her eyes. Bean’s and Sarsgaard’s talents seem wasted in their small roles; I would have liked to see their characters play a bigger part in the movie.

Regardless, of the plot or twist, “Flightplan” is saved by its strong performances.