Panic Room is an ice-slick, heart-pounding, genuine thriller drenched with dark coloring and pulsating with eerie, white-knuckling suspense. It’s proof that director David Fincher is indeed the real thing; with more than a few masterpieces under his belt, he adds yet another sickly, dreary atmospheric masterpiece to his impressive resume. An intense plot pricks the hairs up on the most skeptical viewer’s head, with high decibel visual virtuosity, and twists that turn simplicity into intriguing complexity.
Panic Room is a subversive, moody but sarcastically humorous project, which was engulfed with problems from the start, fortunately its production was never cut, in spite of all the problems. The proclaimed “reigning Queen of 2001”, Nicole Kidman, was originally set to star and engaged in production until she continually injured her knee (the injury had originated on the Moulin Rouge set) and Foster was brought in. However, this was quite alright, because frankly we do not see Jodie Foster in too many films and she’s rather talented. So Foster steps in, but during filming she became pregnant (with her second child) which caused some problems and shots had to be redone. Meanwhile, Fincher must have sensed he was soon becoming a neo-Stanley Kubrick when filming was taking much too long (he also shot over 1, 500 reels of film for Fight Club) and so he fired perfectionist director of photography Darius Khondji.
On the surface the movie is a classic but spiced-up, hyperactive Hitchcockian thriller, yet at heart it’s full of and pumped up with, pure Fincherism. The Fincher atmosphere is a dark hued, grimly saturated, hell on earth type of approach to capturing a movie; a commonly chosen and expertly performed style by music video directors. But Fincher has come into his own with a lyrical and almost poetic look at apocalyptic themes and an intelligent, non-exploitative look at sadistic violence, creating a disturbing celebration of anarchy. The Fincher atmosphere is an atmosphere beyond gritty, immersed in a swarm of sardonic dialogue and always a deliciously uncomfortable, jarring presence.
Like all of Fincher’s films, Panic Room is perfected by a creepy, midnight lighting style: glowing blues and flickering greens. The film is an eclectic genre transcending work of art, taking elements from all of Fincher’s best efforts: Se7en, The Game and Fight Club. Deadly ski-masked men of mystery and power, effective female characters unaware of past cliches, testosterone-fuelled angst, scathing black humor, haughty and wealthy anti-socialites, and the ever-present black & white checkered floor tiles are things always evident in his projects and are, of course, here. A morose but superb Howard Shore score is also very present, obviously humming methodically with the usual somber ambience as well as taking on some Bernard Herrmann-like traits to heighten the material’s Hitchcockian tension. All of this beautifully adorns a rather formula-driven but impressively scripted canvas mastered by suspense virtuoso David Koepp.
Panic Room’s fairly simple premise isn’t really taken beyond its one-dimensional level or theme, but perhaps it couldn’t have been successfully done or as engagingly done as it was. Its flaws are few and far between, considering the material, with rarely a moment of no tension, and nary a moment of no visual fascination. While it’s obviously not a movie of any political or major issue importance and is not an attack or satire on social conventions, it hardly needs to be. With so many special effects-bloated and repulsively moronic mainstream pictures today, Panic Room is as delightfully ruthless and uncompromising as it is a fun reinvention of classic Hollywood thrillers. Essentially it’s about two parallel but opposing forces both driven by desperation, in a situation roused up by the seemingly simply circumstances of both parties, which are later revealed to be much more complex.
A melancholic and intelligent woman, Meg Altman (Jodie Foster), is attempting to regain her dignity as well as happiness in the wake of what we presumed was a messy divorce between her and a wealthy, older, skirt-chasing, pharmaceutical doctor, ex-husband, Stephen Altman (Patrick Bauchau). Meg is an apparently strong but quite subtle, and evidently a single mother, raising a twelve-year-old daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart), who, suggested by her attitude and a Sid Vicious shirt, is on the verge of teenage rebellion. Also, Sarah, besides being blessed with uncanny similarities between her and her mother, is harboring some very reasonable anger towards her unfaithful father (who’s now with a model, played by Nicole Kidman, in a voice cameo) and is a feverish diabetic; a script device or convenience? Maybe, but I bought into it.
The mother and daughter arrive at an upscale Manhattan mansion, in the midst of house shopping which is being steered by Meg’s determination to outdo her ex-husband. They’re given the house tour by a rather pompous British realtor (Ian Buchanan), accompanied by, what I’m presuming was their lawyer, an outspoken woman named Lydia Lynch (an annoyingly flamboyant Ann Magnuson). They discover their new house is equipped with a panic room, a.k.a. a safe room or as a castle keep, in medieval times. The room is a high tech, densely thick, concrete and steel layered security room complete with cameras, for the protection of possessions, people or whatever. The previous owner, an elderly eccentric, also installed an elevator, making the house an ideal place for traps, hiding spots, and Home Alone-inspired madness. Meg and Sarah soon move in but that same night, three dangerous men break in, bent on retrieving the elderly eccentric’s hidden fortune, which is ironically stashed away in the panic room’s floorboards. After a heart-pounding sequence Meg and Sarah find themselves locked in the panic room while the trio of amateurish criminals, the good-hearted security expert, Burnham (Forest Whitaker), the sniveling hothead, Junior (Jared Leto), the mysterious masked crime “professional”, Raoul (Dwight Yoakam), try to break into it.
This clever, pure adrenaline rush is as taunt and tight as a drum, exhibiting nothing but contempt for the modern brainless thrillers. Occasionally it stretches believability and the conclusion, while quite mesmerizing, could have possibly been a bit more extravagant or subtler, in the middle doesn’t quite work as well. It’s not quite as ambitious, theme wise, as Fight Club or as Se7en (whose writer, Andrew Kevin Walker, can be seen in Panic Room as a sleepy neighbor) but works more along the lines of his sometimes unfairly criticized gem, The Game. Meaning that it builds with phenomenal tension, extends a seemingly simple situation into a battle of the wits, and features ironic complex suspense that would have made Hitchcock proud.