Panic Room (2002)
Drama | Thriller | Crime
-- Superbit --
Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) play a deadly game of cat and mouse with three intruders - Burnahm (Forest Whitaker), Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) and Junior (Jared Leto) - during a brutal home invasion. But the Panic Room into
which they escape is the very place that holds what the intruders are desperately seeking.
User Comment: David Goody • Every so often a an off-the-wall director plays it straight. Sometimes it blunts their edge, like Robert Altman's Grisham-by-numbers adaptation of The Gingerbread Man. Sometimes it produces an
entrancing oddity, like David Lynch's The Straight Story. However it sometimes brings out the best of the director, and Panic Room is a massive example of this, showing David Fincher's class through and through.
The story revolves around Meg, a recent divorcee who moves into a cavernous property in Manhattan that looks for all the world like the dream property to take care of her daughter. However on their first night in the house a trio of burglars break in and
a stand-off ensues with Meg and daughter trapped in an impenetrable bunker in the middle of the house (the titular Panic Room) and whilst the burglars trying to get in to access a hidden safe.
It is the greatest credit to the cast, writer and director that a stock genre situtation is shown in such a fresh and vital light throughout. From Forrest Whittaker's compromised morality to Jared Leto's drug addicted craziness each role seems so real it
would be an injustice to attempt to describe them in a few lines. These are not characters, these are people and people can only be defined in a few sentences by a great artist, and here there is definate evidence of greatness at work.
However where the film finds real depth is in the character of Meg. After Nicole Kidman withdrew because of injuries sustained during Moulin Rouge, Jodie Foster was brought in and the character of Meg toughened up and made less glamourous. This change in
the character opens up completely different areas of the film. With the absent husband / father having left for a young model, Kidman would have lent the film an air of rejected fragile beauty being slowly crushed before finding her inner strength. A
classic tale of having to reach the bottom to find a way up.
However with Foster's tougher screen personna we have a battle of the rejected woman trying to re-assert her ability to function in the world alone as stronger as she did before and determined to lose no diginity along the way. The trio of intruders
become like phantoms of her husband whilst her claustrophic fear of the Panic Room mirrors her fear of this strange and new world closing in around her. Given the trust of writer and director, Foster lets her body do all the acting and gives a master
class in showing how dialogue should illustrate everything the character isn't saying.
Fincher's visual style builds on Fight Club, even from a credit sequence that recalls North By Northwest but stands on its own in invention and execution. The whole film seems to be shot in a new form of 3D where every object seems perfectly natural, but
with heightened depths, as if you were admiring the craftsmanship of a perfectly rendered computer simulation, but without being able to see any flaws. This works perfectly in the claustrophobic confines of Panic Room where the viewer is drawn into each
room of the house and left standing next to the protaganists.
Despite featuring a couple of scenes which will have you screaming at the screen because of the characters stupidity to do the sensible thing, it is hard to find fault with David Koepp's taught script. However without Fincher's obsessively bleak vision to
give it an edge Panic Room would have been another slick forgetable thriller, instead it is classic film-making that truly deserves the title of 21st century Hitchcock.
Summary: Possibly Fincher's best film yet
--- JOYA ---
º º