Frantic (film) - Plot

Plot

Dr. Richard Walker is a surgeon visiting Paris with his wife Sondra for a medical conference. At their hotel, she is unable to unlock her suitcase, and Walker determines that she has picked up the wrong one at the airport. While Walker is taking a shower, his wife mysteriously disappears from their hotel room.

Still jet-lagged, he searches for her in the hotel with the help of a polite but mostly indifferent staff and then wanders outside to search himself. A vagrant overhears him in a café and says he saw Walker's wife being forced into a car. Walker is skeptical until he finds his wife's ID bracelet on the cobblestones. He contacts the Paris police and the US embassy, but their responses are bureaucratic and there is little hope anyone will look for her.

As Walker carries on the search himself (with input from a very sympathetic but wary desk clerk at the hotel), he stumbles onto a murder scene and then encounters the streetwise young Michelle, who had mistakenly picked up his wife's suitcase at the airport. It transpires that Michelle is a career smuggler but does not know for whom she is working. She reluctantly helps Walker in his increasingly frantic attempt to learn what was in the switched suitcase and to trade whatever it is for the return of his wife.

It turns out that hidden within a small replica of the Statue of Liberty is a krytron, a small electronic switch used in the detonators of nuclear devices. The film ends with a confrontation beside the River Seine where the terrorists release Walker's wife. However, a firefight ensues between the terrorists and Israeli agents. During the crossfire, the terrorists are killed but Michelle is also shot and dies with Walker and Sondra at her side. Angry and upset, Walker throws the krytron into the river before the Israeli agents get it. Soon after, the Walkers leave Paris.