7500 (2020)

[StevePulaski]

7500 (2020)
Directed by: Patrick Vollrath

Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Rating: ★★★

For a film that mostly takes place in a stuffy cockpit the size of an apartment bathroom, Patrick Vollrath's directorial debut, 7500 is impressively cinematic.

It's so effectively entrapping in some moments, you feel as if you're starting to breathe the musty, stale air of the tight quarters. While not reinventing the wheel of a somewhat stale genre, Vollrath's directorial debut is a reminder of how strong performances can elevate formula to a sustainable level. It's also been a long enough stretch without a notable starring role from Joseph Gordon-Levitt that I fear people have forgotten the talent he possesses. There was a period of time not too long ago when he seemed to be headlining everything from offbeat dramas to biopics before dialing back and enjoying his now lavish life. Despite an extended absence, it's great to see his skillset hasn't at all diminished.

7500 — pronounced "7-5-0-0" — revolves around Gordon-Levitt's Tobias, an American pilot living in Berlin with his flight attendant girlfriend (Aylin Tezel) and their two-year-old son. In the opening minutes, he gears up for what should be a routine trip from Berlin-to-Paris until shortly after takeoff, three Islamic terrorists armed with knives storm the cockpit with the intent of a suicide mission. In a frantic few minutes, Tobias successfully bludgeons one of the hijackers unconscious while locking the other two out, albeit not before his co-pilot is gravely wounded. His only window to the outside world (IE: just outside the pilot door) is a surveillance camera that gives him a real time feed of the hijackers' activities as they take hostages and demand they be let inside.

As viewers, Vollrath, too, traps us inside the cockpit. Once Tobias enters prior to takeoff, we don't leave, and yet again, the single-setting proves immensely effective. But beyond the simple fact the film is confined to a singular location, Vollrath and cinematographer Sebastian Thaler — a frequent collaborator on the director's various shorts — do all they can to provide clarity despite a tight space. Shots still manage to be elegantly framed and seamlessly edited to make use of every inch of the cockpit, and it's the reason the viewer isn't subjected to disorienting pans that make us lose our spacial awareness.

When it comes to communicating with the terrorists, Tobias gets the most out of Verdat (Omid Memar, a real find of a young actor), a 19-year-old radical who visibly begins to have second thoughts about the mission moments after it starts to get real. He's a young man, who overtime recalls his mother and his understandable fear of dying. It's why he progressively cooperates with Tobias more readily as time ticks away and the plane stays afloat, although not without a few palm-sweating instances of turbulence.

Another intriguing element is the lack of a score, which intensifies matters by forcing us to listen to the murmur of the plane engine and the incessant blaring of the control panel. There's nothing in the way of synths or obtuse musical cues that overplay the natural suspense that occurs throughout the film, but I fear it's one of the elements that might go unnoticed. If nothing else, for yet another rock-solid performance by Gordon-Levitt in a performance deceptively challenging, especially after a sabbatical from a prominent leading role.

Like Buried, which saw Ryan Reynolds trapped in a coffin, and Phone Booth, which saw Colin Farrell enclosed in a phone booth with a sniper aimed at his head, 7500 is tense sit, elevated greatly by an ensemble of aesthetics that work to heighten the unnerving premise. Simply stated, it's wonderful to have Joseph Gordon-Levitt back in the spotlight and it's promising to see a new director make waves.

NOTE: 7500 is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Omid Memar, Aylin Tezel, Murathan Muslu, and Paul Wollin. Directed by: Patrick Vollrath.