March 29, 2002 | The premise is simple enough to be encapsulated in a TV Guide program listing: “A mother and her teen-age daughter seek refuge in a specially-reinforced ‘panic room’ when home invaders break into their New York townhouse.” That’s all you really need to know.
Well, OK, maybe that and a little bit more: Jodie Foster is the mother, David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club) is the director, and Panic Room is a humdinger of a heart-in-your-mouth, edge-of-your-seat thriller. Sleek, slick and suspenseful, it leaves no stone unturned, no contrivance unexploited, as it goes about the business of pumping your pulse and chilling your spine.
Screenwriter David Koepp (Stir of Echoes, Jurassic Park) obviously didn’t waste much time on exposition while constructing this rollercoaster ride. Or if he did, Fincher simply ripped those pages out of the script, to move full speed ahead.
All we get are the basics: Meg Altman (Foster), the newly divorced wife of a very rich fellow, moves into a spacious Manhattan townhouse that comes equipped with an elevator, video-camera monitors and a fully-stocked “panic room” — i.e., a secure hideaway with concrete walls, a thick steel door, ample supplies of food and water, a separate ventilation system and a bank of surveillance monitors. (Mind you, she can’t get HBO on any of those monitors. But, hey, you can’t have everything, right?)
The early scenes zip along at a pace that suggests Fincher felt he was playing to an audience of attention-deficient schoolchildren. (I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether that’s an apt way to describe most people you encounter these days at your friendly neighborhood megaplex.) And the pace rarely flags throughout the rest of the movie.
Style dominates content, even when it comes to such niceties as continuity and establishing shots. Employing two accomplished directors of cinematography, Conrad W. Hall and Darius Khondji, and a grab bag of CGI trickery, Fincher swoops and swirls across rooms, around actors and through doors, windows and keyholes. You know that famous scene in Citizen Kane where the camera appears to move through a nightclub sign and dip through a skylight? Well, take that scene, multiply its magic by about, oh, a thousand or so, and you’ll know what to expect here.
You could quibble, of course, that the movie moves a tad too quickly during the first 10 or 15 minutes. Fincher is so impatient to get the plot rolling that he doesn’t give us sufficient time to fully understand some key plot points. For example: Until Meg specifically refers to her daughter by name, it’s not entirely clear whether Sarah (Kristen Stewart) — a surly teen with short-cropped hair – is indeed a boy or a girl.
On the other hand, Fincher takes pains to offer at least fleeting glimpses of items that, once planted, will flower into major plot twists. All we need is a quick peek at insulin in Sarah’s bedroom mini-fridge to start worrying: “Uh-oh! She’s diabetic! Now since this movie is called ‘Panic Room,’ which presumably means she’ll wind up in the panic room, what’ll happen if she needs a shot?” Fincher plays fast and rough, but he also plays fair.
It’s a dark and stormy night (of course) when Meg and Sarah are roused from their slumber by the arrival of three intruders – Burnham (Forest Whitaker), Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) and Junior (Jared Leto) – who don’t expect to find anyone at home. What they do expect, based on Junior’s insider information, is to find a large sum of money hidden somewhere in the house.
Unfortunately, that somewhere is the panic room. Even more unfortunately, the intruders don’t pack up and leave after Meg and Sarah secure themselves behind the steel door.
The bulk of Panic Room is a nerve-racking battle of wits between the frantic but resourceful mother and daughter, and the none-too-bright but not-entirely dumb home invaders. The bad guys employ stratagems to break into the secure hideaway — pumping gas into air ducts, smashing walls with sledgehammers, etc. -– while the good gals seek some way, any way, to alert the outside world to their plight.
Stephan (Patrick Bauchau), Meg’s ex-husband, eventually pops up at the front door, only to be summarily beaten by the increasingly impatient home invaders. The poor guy doesn’t really add much to the story, but he inadvertently raises a couple of questions that Panic Room never bothers to acknowledge, much less answer. Given the obvious disparity between their ages, did Stephan originally claim Meg as a trophy wife? And if so, did he recently trade her in for a newer model?
Given the widely-publicized reports that Foster was pregnant during the filming of Panic Room, some members of the audience will doubtless be distracted while stealing peeks at the actress’ tummy for tell-tale signs of incipient motherhood. Of course, considering that Foster spends most of the movie in a revealing tank top, other moviegoers will keep their eyes affixed to another part of her anatomy. If you can avoid the temptation to gawk in either direction, you’ll notice that Foster infuses her character with appealing pluck, intelligence and maternal pugnacity. In short, she’s everything the part needs, and more.
Whitaker does an outstanding job of conveying latent decency and nervous misgivings as Burnham, the most reluctant of the three home invaders. (He’s obviously new to this home invasion business – he arrives wearing a jumpsuit with his name printed above his left breast pocket.) Leto is convincing as a live-wire hot-head who isn’t as smart as he thinks, and Yoakam is nicely understated as a tough guy who isn’t as stupid as he seems. And once we get the gender issue settled, Stewart is affecting and effective as Sarah, a daughter who’s every bit as
iron-willed as her graceful-under-pressure mother.
