The first scene of the film takes place aboard a plane that is traveling to Novosibirsk in Russia.
Among the passenger is a mother with her sleeping 7 year old daughter, Katya.
During their flight, we can see that the plane’s engine is tweaking.
Soon after, little Katya finds her mother gone from her side,
shortly before the plane announces that they will make an emergency landing. As the plane
starts to lose control, Katya finds a sketchy old lady chanting unintelligible words behind her.
Katya then passes out from fear, right when the plane's engines explode,
making it impossible to prevent the crash.
But somehow, Katya makes it out alive. She
swings her squeaky leg brace alone through the woods, as she is the sole survivor of the crash.
20 years pass, and a crew of reporters find Katya to interview her to mark the
20th anniversary since the infamous tragedy. Accompanied by her now 7-year-old daughter Diana,
Katya agrees to the interview. As she has dealt with her trauma,
Katya tells the reporter that she does not want to think about that particular day any longer.
Her journey with trauma has also made her choose to become a psychologist for a living.
Diana then intervenes, telling the reporter Katya may still be triggered if she hears
the squeaks of a leg brace, as it takes her back to her childhood. Since her mother is no
longer afraid of flying, they will soon take a flight to meet Diana’s grandpa.
One day, Katya and Diana hop into a late-night flight, and it appears that there’s barely any
passenger on the flight, as many passengers have changed their plans due to bad weather.
As they board the plane, Diana immediately tells Katya that she'd like to sit in the back,
but Katya says that those aren't their seats. Before take-off, the two get introduced to a
man named Alexei who sits in the row across from them. Upon noticing Katya’s nervousness,
he tells her to calm down, and assures her everything will be alright.
Not long after, Katya notices a commotion happening several rows behind them,
as an old woman named Galina starts having a panic attack because she is deathly afraid of flying.
Katya who is a psychologist jumps into action by talking the woman out of her fear, and
handing her a couple of her stress-relief pills. In the front rows of the plane, a businessman
named Nikolai nosily asks a broody hipster sitting across from him what he’s drawing, to which the
hipster only gives him a vague answer, saying that drawing helps him “see,” whatever that means.
Right as the plane is about to take off, Katya begins hearing a metal
squeak from above, which triggers her. And so, she retreats to the lavatory,
and takes a pill to calm herself down, ignoring the scolding of a stern stewardess
telling her that she should be seated right about now.
While the attendants go over the safety instructions, she suddenly hears her
mother’s voice, and finds the lavatory door looking completely different.
When she opens the door, she eerily finds herself back in her childhood home.
until she finds a door that immediately leads her back to the airplane.
Now taken aback, Katya looks around, and notices that the emergency exit is blocked,
before she gets stopped by the stern stewardess,
who tells her to get back to her seat. Seeing how distraught Katya looks,
Alexei tries asking her what’s up but she doesn’t answer, so her daughter Diana answers it for her.
The daughter tells Alexei that Katya is the sole survivor of a fatal plane crash,
prompting Alexei to voice his condolences. The plane finally takes off, and once it is
airborne, Katya apologizes to Alexei for being so rude earlier. The two end up having a small talk,
with Alexei revealing that he’s a reporter who has visited every warzone in the world to cover news.
Later when everyone is asleep, the plane flies through a stormy night,
but all of the sudden the sky turns red, and a series of palms appear on the windows.
The next scene shows little Katya having supper with her mother,
and asks her mother if the scar on her leg will heal soon, but her mom tells her that it
might stay with her for the rest of her life. To Katya's horror, she soon notices that her
mother looks disfigured in her reflection in the mirror. This is where it gets weird; Katya
asks her mother if she died in the plane crash, which offends the mother, so the mother tells
Katya to stop asking such an absurd question, because it’s been three months since the flight.
While the mother goes to wash the dishes, Katya begins hearing the creaking sounds of a leg brace.
And then, the mom starts contorting her body in a strange way,
Luckily, it was only a dream; she is woken up by a turbulence, as well as the rest of the passengers.
The turbulence persists, and Galini’s husband, Evgeni, suddenly loses consciousness,
prompting the passengers as well as the stewardesses to come to his aid.
Katya, who is medically trained, instructs them on what to do.
They lay the man down on the ground for Katya to perform CPR.
But then, he wakes up, starts choking Katya and whispers strange words,
before passing out again. To make things worse, the turbulence is
getting more extreme at the same time,
while Katya freezes at the sight of a shadowy hand reaching for the seat behind Alexei.
Until for a second, everything stops when Evgeni draws his last breath.
As if that’s not enough, the whole plane rattles with extreme turbulence, and the rest of the
passengers are forced to fasten themselves to the nearest seats. The stewardess then grabs the extra
oxygen tank and rushes to Diana, but she is thrown against the ceiling, and loses the extra oxygen.
Meanwhile, Katya slowly loses consciousness from the lack of oxygen, and recalls a memory
of the old lady from her long-ago flight.
When she wakes up, the turbulence has stopped,
she rushes back to a frightened Diana and assures her that she won't leave her again.
Afterwards, she wastes no time before telling Alexei about the old woman she
saw on the flight 20 years ago, and how she thinks the old lady is behind this,
because the strange words Evgeni whispered to her earlier was similar to the old lady’s.
Katya theorizes that the old lady is angered because she was the only one to survive the
crash back then, and would like to end her life too. Alexei, however, says that the man's death
was completely natural, and that Katya must be hallucinating because of the pill she took.
And so, she moves on to the grieving Galina to express her condolences. When she comes back
to Diana, she sees her drawing of a plane where they are sitting in the back seat,
but she again says those aren't their seats, and they return to their row. Once again, Katya claims
she heard her mother's voice before takeoff, and think she was trying to warn her about something.
Meanwhile in the front row, Nikolai the businessman tries to talk with the brood
hipster again, telling him that he has been traveling for over a week and just wants to go
home to his family. He also shows him pictures of his kids, but the hipster keeps drawing something
which is revealed to be a sketch of the businessman smoking.
Back to Katya, she is still convinced that something's wrong,
and mentions that her leg scar has disappeared despite seeing it that morning.
She also remarks on how odd it is that a passenger died, but they did not hear
anything from the captain. And then, Alexei’s head starts hurting, while at the same time,
Diana seems to be having a conversation with someone in the row behind them.
It is reveal that Diana has been talking to a girl, who ominously told Diana that Katya will leave her as soon as
a man starts blazing, which confuses the mom. To make things even weirder, there is suddenly
an announcement that the plane will now change course because of the storm, and will now be
landing in Novosibirsk; the same city little Katya was flying to with her mom 20 years ago.
Here, Katya again notices something is wrong with the attendant, seeing the woman's cold behavior.
Shortly after, it is revealed that the oxygen tank is leaking underneath the businessman’s seat,
while some sort of liquid leaks through the ceiling above him. Diana then tells Katya
again that the girl just told her that she will leave her, right when the frustrated businessman
takes out his cigarette and is about to light it. Katya notices this and runs up to him,
but it is too late; the man goes ablaze as the leaking liquid hits the lighter,
and the oxygen tank below him only makes the fire bigger.
Oddly, Katya sees a face in the fire screaming at her,
before a couple of stewardesses rush to put out the blaze. Luckily, or not so luckily, the businessman
is still alive, but is severely burned. While the attendants try to give him first aid,
Katya rushes back to Diana, but ends up seeing the shadowy figure again.
And then all of the sudden, she finds herself back in her house with her daughter,
one day before this flight, with the scar on her leg is still in place too. She then embraces her
daughter, and suggests that they should cancel their trip tomorrow, which the daughter agrees to.
Later that night, she decides she no longer wants to take the medications and dumps them down the
toilet. Katya then starts hearing her daughter’s voice, but she is nowhere to be found. Suddenly,
the house starts shaking, while the daughter angrily yells at Katya for allegedly leaving her.
Yet again, she gets transported back to the plane, and Galina snaps her out of it.
Diana runs up to her, and says that the mother just walked past her and did not even notice her;
Katya asks her to forgive her negligence. The mother and daughter are interrupted by Alexei,
who needs Katya’s help in taking care of the burnt man.
After taking a look at the poor man, she deduces that his airway must be blocked,
and therefore she teaches Alexei to help hold his head straight to help him breathe. While she’s
going through the first aid kid, Alexei asks her why she zoned out earlier, so Katya explains that
she thinks she’s starting to hallucinate, and therefore confuses her nightmares with reality.
Across from her, the broody hipster is still drawing while mumbling weird words to himself,
which irritates Katya. She loses her cool and starts yelling at the hipster, but Alexei stops her.
While this is happening, Nikolai tries to reach for his mobile phone,
so the hipster gets up and helps him. He shows the businessman his wallpaper,
which displays a picture of Nikolai happily smiling with his family.
After seeing his family’s faces for the last time, Nikolai takes his last breath and passes away.
Now that they’ve lost yet another soul on the flight, Katya apologizes for lashing
out at the hipster, and they finally introduce themselves: his name is Pavel.
Afterwards, Katya notices that Galina isn’t in her seat, and has been in the lavatory for a
while. Worried for her safety, Katya bangs on the lavatory door, annoying the stewardesses,
who think that Katya is mentally unwell and should sit back down,
but when they finally get the door open,
Galina isn’t in there. Meanwhile unbeknownst to them, Evgeni’s dead body opens his eyes.
When Katya is about to return to her seat, Evgeni pushes her to fall to the seats behind her, where
she is held down by a number of dark hands. Katya then notices that she is strangely in row 19.
She snaps back to reality, and finds Evgeni’s dead body sitting still. She also sees the shadowy
figure, which seems to be telling her something. Katya then rushes up to her daughter,
and insists that they should leave the plane right this second.
Witnessing this unfold, Alexei tries to stop her, but immediately starts
bleeding out of his eye, and passes out. The two stewardesses rush up to them,
also trying to keep Katya from exiting the plane. But then, one of them starts vomiting water,
until she collapses and dies. Seeing this, Katya starts to accuse the stern stewardess
of being responsible for this as well. She then walks up to Pavel and snags away
his sketchbook. Katya now realizes that he’s somehow been drawing her visions.
As soon as she gets the hint about the exit, Pavel's body dissipates into thin air.
Yet still, the stern stewardess and even Alexei try to convince
Katya to not go for the pilot’s cabin’s door. They tell her that they’re simply trying to
protect her from something. But then,…
The stewardess gets pulled away by an invisible force, while Alexei starts bleeding
out of his head, until he collapses and dies. With no other choice, Katya breaks through the
pilot door, but instead, she impossibly finds another plane cabin that looks exactly like
the one she came from. Not losing hope, she keeps going from one pilot door to another,
and yet another, until she finds herself in a completely different
looking cabin from the previous one.
Suddenly, Diana is no longer by her side,
but rather, at the end of the hall with a shadowy figure, and Katya runs to get to her.
Well, it's at this point that the movie's plot shifts dramatically, as it is revealed that none
of this was real, and Katya is actually still on the doomed plane that we knew was going to
crash 20 years ago. The old lady who Katya always thought had caused the crash, tells her that she
put her to sleep, because she did not want the little Katya to see how terrible death is. Plus,
all the visions she had been seeing are just a glimpse of a future life she's not going to have.
Since Katya keeps trying to wake up and prove that she doesn't want to die,
the old lady releases Katya from her spell, and Katya's destiny is now in her own hands.
Then we back to the past, where we see that the people on the plane are
the same ones Katya has been imagining interacting with in her future life.
Galina and her husband Evgeni are sitting a few rows behind them, when Evgeni gets a heart attack,
and Katya’s mother comes to his aid. For the last time, the sleeping little
Katya returns to her hallucination to say goodbye to her imaginary daughter Diana,
during which Diana tells her to simply pay attention to the little
clues she’s been given throughout this hallucination in order to save herself.
When little Katya finally wakes up, we are taken back to the scene of the plane crashing at the
beginning of the movie.
Little Katya crawls toward the back seats, and manages to get to her mother.
In this horrendous situation, little Katya also witnesses all the other passengers die one by one.
Alexei then scoops her up, and helps them buckle up in the back seats,
but unfortunately, he is killed by the explosion.
The film ends after the plane crash, with both of them survive,
and seated in what is none other than Row 19.