Turbulence

Panic in a Wicker Basket

Hot air balloons are ridiculous machines. They're basically picnic baskets dangling from a giant flammable sack, fully at the mercy of the wind, and we all agree to call that romance. I've always found them mildly horrifying, mostly because the illusion of safety depends on everybody behaving very calmly inside a wicker box. Claudio Fäh's 2025 thriller *Turbulence* gets that peculiar, faintly stupid terror. It takes the bones of an erotic stalker thriller—*Fatal Attraction* with less boiling water—and traps them inside a four-by-four basket floating 5,000 meters above the Italian Dolomites. The whole premise is shamelessly high-concept, which honestly makes me respect it a little.



The setup runs on bad choices, bruised marriage, and old-fashioned guilt. Zach (Jeremy Irvine) is a wealthy executive trying to patch things up with his wife Emmy (Hera Hilmar) after a miscarriage. Their expensive attempt at a reset gets wrecked when Julia (Olga Kurylenko)—a woman Zach met at a hotel bar the previous night—steps onto their private balloon ride just before takeoff. Then there's their pilot, Harry, played by Kelsey Grammer with the booming, blissfully oblivious energy of an American expat who would rather sing sea shanties and point at mountain peaks. Grammer gives the first act a weirdly delightful buoyancy. He's acting like this is a theme-park ride while a lethal little mind game is unfolding inches behind him.

Fäh is genuinely smart about the space. Once the balloon is airborne, the film understands that the basket itself is the trap. The camera keeps us there, shoulder to shoulder with them, and you start to feel how little room there is for either movement or lying. Early on, Julia starts dropping delicate little hints about her night with Zach while the wind roars around them. Emmy hears polite conversation. Zach hears blackmail. Irvine, who began as an earnest open-faced presence in films like *War Horse*, is more interesting here because panic has curdled him. His whole body tightens by degrees. Every minute his shoulders inch higher, and all that executive confidence just drains away in the thin air.



The problem is that the script doesn't quite know how to keep that pressure simmering. Around the midpoint of its lean 96-minute runtime, the movie jumps from nasty marital mind games into full survival-thriller mode. Grammer exits in a way that is abrupt enough to earn a real gasp. After that, the danger becomes more literal: freezing, crashing, dangling over open air. Some of the movie's nerve goes with that shift. The first half works because the threat is intimate and humiliating. The second starts relying on screaming and near-plunges. It also doesn't help that the visual effects occasionally give the game away. There are stretches where the Dolomites start looking more like a backdrop on a soundstage than a place you'd actually fall to your death in.

Critic Josh Bell of Crooked Marquee wrote that "a movie with a premise this silly should not be this dull." I wouldn't go quite that far, though I get what he means. *Turbulence* stumbles most when it starts treating itself like solemn psychological profundity instead of the fundamentally bonkers setup it is.



Still, there is a certain pleasure in a thriller that more or less delivers the exact promise of its poster. *Turbulence* is a blunt little machine, using sky-high claustrophobia to force its characters into the sort of honesty they kept avoiding on solid ground. Not a smooth ride, no. But as a disposable, mildly deranged anxiety exercise, it keeps you leaning over the edge, wondering how much emotional baggage can get tossed before the whole thing finally drops.