Panic Room
Grade: B+
Actors: Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart, Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, and Dwight Yoakam
Director: David Fincher
Rated R for violence and language


David Fincher's claustrophobic film Panic Room is a distant cousin to Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Rear Window. While both films take place in a small area, Window injected some social commentary, but Panic Room only wishes to create tension. And create tension it does...

The story revolves around Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart, a dead ringer for Foster) move into an old Manhattan brownstone that has everything you could want: a large kitchen, beautiful wood work, a working elevator, four floors, and, most curiously and importantly, a panic room. A panic room is where the wealthy reside when home invaders come a-knockin'. It has a separate phone lone, a food supply, a first aide kit, and some moniters so you can watch the happenings in the house. Oh yes, I musn't forget the intercom system that comes in handy when trying to create some comedy.

Meg, of course, doesn't believe that she'll ever need it. Boy, is she wrong. On her first, sleepless, night in the house, three invaders interrupt her quiet life. One of them, Burnham (Forest Whitaker) works at a security company who installs rooms of the panic variety, of course. Junior (Jared Leto, a seemingly Fincher fave) is the loose cannon who gets angry easily and of course must meet his fate before any of the others. Then, there's the guy with the mask (I'll just say that these characters aren't important enough to remember their names) played by Dwight Yoakam...he's the sinister one.

It might seem like I have a dislike for this picture, but you couldn't be more wrong. The character, cliche as they may be, serve their purpose and serve it well. You don't get much better than the mother who is STONG because she used to live with her ex-husband in the lap of luxury with a daughter who has diabetes and the biggest problem she encounters now (after the "nasty" divorce) is where did she put that damn tylenol after drinking too much wine?! Burnham is the criminal with a heart of gold who only wants to steal the money, but not hurt anyone.

I will bash on these characters because they're so typically of the genre, but the film isn't concerned with characters, it's concerned with creating a paranoid atmosphere, and Fincher does so in aces. His creative vision along with score-meister Howard Shore (who scored last year's Lord of the Rings and 1996's lurid and horrible Crash) and cinematographers Darius Khondji and Conrad L. Hall make this the scariest living area since Stanley Kubrick's haunting The Shining reached the screen.

Who other than David Fincher, auteur of three (now four) back-to-back fabulous films starting with The Game and going through Seven and Fight Club could make a simple task such as getting a cell phone from under the bed into a heart-stopping and meticulously crafted scene? Not since Guy Pearce searched for a pen in Memento has the mundane turned into something almost as dire as stopping a nuclear missile from slamming into the United States.

And while Panic Room doesn't really mean anything in the end, the director has treated us to a wonderful ride that we're glad we participated in. There's no greater meaning. There's no bad guy catharsis. There's nothing holding this film back from what it wants to be, should be, and is: pure entertainment.


--Brian Jones, 2002 --If you would like to comment on this review or any others, please e-mail me at SilentCynic15@cs.com.