Panic Room

There are few filmmakers who use computers as creatively as David Fincher. Sure, both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have used digital effects to develop vast, imaginative worlds, and Robert Zemeckis showed in What Lies Beneath how CGI could be harnessed in lame attempts to create suspense. But in Panic Room, Fincher repairs what Zemeckis screwed up and creates a true Hitchcock film of the modern era. If Hitch was around today, and had a few contacts at Industrial Lights and Magic, his films would probably look a hell of a lot like this.

Each of Finch's previous films seemed to have been more about atmosphere and theme than plot. Se7en featured several extraneous scenes designed to develop the desired message, as did Fight Club. But those philosophical (and, some might argue, pretentious) diversions have been gleefully tossed over the side here -- Panic Room is 100 percent story, and once it starts, it never lets up for an instant. Many may mourn the loss of those thought-provoking diversions, but Fincher makes up for it by piling on the suspense to almost unbearable levels.

Jodie Foster is Meg Altman, a recent divorcee searching for a new place for her and her teenage daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart). They luck into a showing of a home not yet on the market -- a spacious mansion on the west side, complete with a yard and a working elevator. But the home's most intriguing feature is the panic room: a bomb shelter-like cubbyhole tucked into one of the bedrooms. It features its own ventilation shafts, its own phone lines, emergency supplies, and surveillance monitors revealing every room in the house. The room is surrounded on all sides by three inches of steel, and once the door is locked from the inside, it can only be unlocked from the inside. It's designed as a shelter, should someone break in.

Meg -- who suffers from mild claustrophobia -- isn't too wild about the room, but Sarah's impressed, and the house is the right price, so they take it. But on their very first night, they are forced to take cover in the room when (surprise!) a trio of burglars break in. The panic room seems to be the safest course of action, until a complication arises: the robbers don't want high-tech electronics or jewelry, they're after something else -- and it's inside the panic room.

Thus begins a battle of wits between those within and those without. The thieves make a move; Meg and Sarah countermove. It's fascinating to watch, and screenwriter David Koepp (Snake Eyes, Mission: Impossible) should be commended for keeping everyone on an even playing field -- there is no stupidity in this house. The girls are razor-sharp, and their quick thinking saves their lives on numerous occasions. And the robbers -- the security expert Burnham (Forrest Whitaker), the jumpy Junior (Jared Leto), and the masked psycho Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) -- are just as smart, pulling brilliant schemes out of thin air. There are a few MacGyver wisecracks thrown around, but they're accurate -- everyday household objects are used to create elaborate traps. It's a blast to watch these people think.

Actually, it's a blast to watch everything in this movie, thanks to David Fincher and his pair of cinematographers, Darius Khondji and Conrad W. Hall (son of Oscar-winning DP Conrad L. Hall). Not content to merely photograph the proceedings, Fincher's computer-assisted camera zooms around the house, through floorboards, cracks in the wall, and even a keyhole as the evening's events unfold. This fly-on-the-wall style is incredible -- it pulls you out of your normal role as audience member and throws you into the action. It's easy to forget that you're just watching a movie up there. A pair of sequences in particular (one as the thieves arrive in the rain, the other a slow-motion scene shot almost entirely without sound) are especially noteworthy in this regard. It's a breathtaking experience; I found myself (literally) on the edge of my seat, my $4.00 soda forgotten about in the cupholder beside me. It's absolutely riveting.

Fans of Fincher's work may be a tad disappointed in this movie's apparent lack of weight. Unlike Se7en, Fight Club, or The Game, there aren't any heady topics for discussion after the film present here. Oh, you can see Finch toying with some ideas, like the horrors of intrusion and violation, and the power of the will in defense, but they seem peripheral to the point. Fincher has called Panic Room his "popcorn movie" -- the easy-to-digest blockbuster for the mainstream audience. Don't let that fool you, though -- he is definitely at the top of his form in this one.

If the film has a flaw, it's only a minor one. There's a lack of character resolution at the end; something feels missing from the final scene. But as I said, it's a minor problem. Panic Room is a near-perfect suspense thrill-machine, and a worthy heir to the title of the Hitchcock Film of the Twenty-First Century. I hope Robert Zemeckis is watching.

Rating: ****1/2