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Buckle up for a ride that’s turbulent with highly uneven quality but gets to its destination with a certain style. Black Box: Flight 298 is a horror-sci-fi-thriller that mostly takes place on a flight supposedly bound from New Orleans to Seattle, although it’s quite obvious this was filmed in a studio equipped with plenty of green screens to accommodate some cheesy visual effects in the back half.

However, before director Steven Quale and screenwriter Stephen Susco reveal the monster mastermind behind all the mayhem, they build up a pretty good head of suspense by gesturing towards the paranoia and terror many feel around air travel. Opening text ominously claims that the rates at which planes lose contact with ground control are much higher than the US Federal Aviation Administration admits, which doesn’t sound so bad really to viewers not prone to aerophobic anxiety. But that’s only the beginning of a yarn that bounces off tinfoil-hat paranoid conspiracy theories – there is literally a character who wraps her head in aluminium foil to protect herself from upper-atmosphere radiation – as well as more general angst around strange things that go bump in the stratosphere.

In the ensemble cast, Tom Brittney comes to the forefront as Jeremy, a man with resting bereaved face, who starts to suspect something is seriously wrong when the sky starts putting on a light show in all the colours. He ends up teamed with sensible flight attendant Emma (Holly White), air marshal Lauren (Boadicea Ricketts), and moppet Chloe (Molly Belle Wright) when the big bad thing reveals itself, and they hide out in the hold with a lot of very distressed dogs. Cheerable moments are provided when an obnoxious passenger in first class (Danny Mac, like many other actors here actually a Brit doing his best Yank accent) gets skewered and accosted in other undignified ways.

• Black Box: Flight 298 is on digital platforms from 6 July.