Director – Alexander Babaev, Screenplay – Michael Smiy, Producers – Sergey Bagirov, Kirill Burdikhin, Irakli Karbaya & Stepan Korshunov, Photography – Nikolay Smirnov, Music – Ruslan Muratov, Production Design – Yuri Karasik, Alexey Lavrukhin & Dmitriy Ledenev. Production Company – KIT Film Studio/Monumental Pictures/Red Media/IKA Film.
Cast
Svetlana Ivanova (Ekaterina Rykova), Wolfgang Cerny (Alexey), Marta Timofeeva (Diana Rykova), Irina Egorova (Galina), Anatoliy Kot (Nikolay), Viktoriya Korlyakova (Inessa), Anna Glaube (Tatiana), Denis Yasik (Pavel), Ivan Verkhovykh (Evginy), Vitaliya Kornienko (Little Katya), Ekaterina Vilkova (Katya’s Mother), Sergey Druzyak (The Reporter), Yola Sanko (The Witch)
Plot
Twenty years ago, young Katerina Rykova was the sole survivor of a plane crash near Novosibirsk. In the present day, she is a psychologist and has a young daughter Diana. For the first time since the crash, she boards a flight to go and visit her father. It is wintry conditions and there are only a handful of people aboard. Not long into the flight and the passengers start to be killed in bizarre ways. Katerina believes that the witch who was sitting behind her on the flight twenty years earlier has returned to curse this flight.
In the late 2010s, Russian dark fantasy and science-fiction has become one of the most exciting new fields of fantastic cinema in the world with the likes of The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead (2016), The Queen of Spades (2016), The Blackout (2019), The Ninth (2019), Baba Yaga, Terror of the Dark Forest (2020), Sputnik (2020), The Superdeep (2020) and I have only begun to scratch the surface. (See Russian Cinema).
The airplane thriller genre was big a few years ago. We had thrillers like Turbulence (1997), Red Eye (2005), Flightplan (2006), Non-Stop (2014) and Mayday (2015). There have been supernatural variations such as The Horror at 37,000 Feet (1973), Final Destination (2000), Flight 666 (2018) and Shadow in the Cloud (2020), although the classic here was The Twilight Zone episode Nightmare at 20,000 Feet (1963) and its remake in the film Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983). Maybe the nearest to Row 19 would be the Takashi Shimizu-directed 7500 (2014), a ghost story set aboard a plane flight.
Row 19 shapes up to be a fairly solid variant on the airplane horror film. The characters of Katya, her daughter and all the crew and passengers are well drawn and all of the actors give good performances in the parts. Director Alexander Babaev creates some shock despatches – in particular, when Anatoliy Kot manages to set himself on fire when he lights up a cigarette. There are vividly surreal images – the light coming from outside the plane in scarlet red, while bloodied hands press up against the windows; or the witch woman seeming to be creeping out from behind seats and fittings.
Svetlana Ivanova and daughter Marta Timofeeva board the plane flight
The film feels like is a feature-length version of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, which was about an aerophobe getting on a plane and experiencing panic attacks and paranoias at the same time as only they can see (or possibly imagine) something is happening outside on the wing. The only major difference is that Row 19 seems to substitute a witch for Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’s gremlin on the wing.
The directorial mood carries you a long way but the main issue I had with the film is working out actually what was going on. At one point, Svetlana Ivanova has dream sequences where she sees herself back as a child again and with her mother apparently having survived the crash where you are not quite sure what is going on and whether this is some sort of Alternate Timeline. Things become very confusing at the end where I wasn’t sure whether we were experiencing some kind of airplane deathdream film like 7500 or else everything was a flash forward fantasy of some alternate life being had by Katya after the witch placed her in a dream.
Row 19 comes from Alexander Babaev, who has mostly worked as an assistant director. Babaev had previously directed the US-made horror films Bornless Ones (2016) and Hospice (2019).
