Director Report Card: David Fincher (2002)

6. Panic Room

“Fight Club” may be a cult classic now but, upon release, it was considered alienating to both audiences and critics. The reception certainly wasn't enough to revoke David Fincher's Auteur License – the movie still made over 100 million dollars worldwide – but he still made a deliberate pivot with his next project. “Panic Room” was a script from David Koepp, the scribe behind blockbusters like “Jurassic Park” and “Mission: Impossible.” Fincher himself would describe the project as a “popcorn movie.” The filmmaker was clearly setting out to make the most commercial motion picture he could. Considering “Panic Room” would gross 197 million against a 48 million dollar budget, I am going to say that he succeeded in that goal. Yet how does “Panic Room” stand up as a movie?

Recently divorced from her rich husband, Meg Altman and her daughter, Sarah, are searching for a new home. They find a four-story brownstone on the upper West Side of Manhattan. The previous owner was a rich old man in a wheelchair, who installed an elevator and an extensive security system... Which includes a panic room, a fortified steel room hooked up to cameras all over the house. The room makes Meg uncomfortable but the house is selling at a bargain, so her and Sarah immediately move in. That night, three men – the greedy grandson of the previous owner, a career criminal, and a man who installs panic rooms for a living – break into the house. Meg and Sarah retreat to the panic room but the millions the intruders are seeking are inside the room too. An intense battle of the minds ensues. 

It's pretty funny that this – a grim story of survival and murder and betrayal – is David Fincher's idea of a popcorn movie. Yet home invasion thrillers have a long history at the box office. “Panic Room” harkens back to films like “Wait Until Dark” or “Lady in a Cage.” In movies like these, it's not just human life that is endangered. Instead, the idea is that the intruders are violating the safety of someone's home, someone's most private inner sanctum. In “Panic Room,” Meg and Sarah have had no time to adjust to the home. Instead, the panic room becomes their bastion of safety, their last line of defense against invaders. The film shrinks the home invasion thriller down to its most confined area.

Meg hates the panic room. From the minute she steps inside it, during the initial tour, she compares it to Poe's “Premature Burial” and “A Cask of Amontillado.” Meg is claustrophobic and nearly hyperventilates when locking herself inside. Meg is also a single mom, striving to prove that she can take care of herself and her daughter without her husband's help. She is literally boxed-in inside the panic room but also figuratively boxed-in into her role as a single mother, a woman alone who has a lot to protect and little else defending her. The panic room becomes a metaphor for her entire situation, beset on all sides but doing everything she can to protect herself and her daughter.

Part of what attracted David Fincher to Koepp's script was its small scale setting. “Fight Club” had 100 different locations and he was obviously interested in something less ambitious for his follow-up. Of course, this presents challenges of its own. How do you keep a whole movie that revolves around a couple rooms in a house interesting? “Panic Room's” script bends in as many directions as possible to keep the pace pumping along. Meg runs in and out of the panic room. The burglars travel up and down the house. Eventually, the crooks end up inside the panic room as well. You've got to admire Koepp and the other writers for doing everything they can to keep a limited story as varied as possible. 

Even if “Panic Room's” script leaps around its limited sets of locations, Fincher tries other ways to keep the central home as cinematic as possible. He expands upon the techniques he used in “Fight Club.” As the interlopers break into the house, his camera peers into and slides through the keyhole. The camera continues to covertly sneak through the house, through the handles of a coffee pot and the pipes in the wall. Using CGI to zoom into the tiny crevices of the home makes a small area a lot larger. Some might say it's a desperate way to spice up a movie with only a handful of locations but it still looks pretty cool. Especially when Fincher puts the thieves on one side of the wall and Meg and Sarah, in the elevator, on another.

Another way “Panic Room” endeavors to keep the tension up is by constantly having its hero racing against the clock. The bandits pump gas into the panic room, in hopes of forcing Meg out, cutting off her oxygen. Eventually, our heroine attempts to tap into the phone line, only for the burglars to race to stop her from succeeding in this goal. The biggest race-against-the-clock involves Sarah. She's diabetic, which is set up subtly via glimpses of insulin in the fridge and a glucometer. We slowly watch her diabetic symptoms grow more severe as times goes on. That makes every minute count, making a tense situation even more perilous.

The first half of “Panic Room” is reliably tense, because the film finds new ways to keep the proverbial pot boiling. One of the most inventive moments in the movie involves that canister of gas, which end up being ignited. The sequence of a tank rocketing around the room, while a cloud of blue fire billowing overhead in the panic room, is probably “Panic Room” at its most exciting. It's closely followed by another moment that actually makes good use of slow-motion. When Meg rushes out to grab a cell phone that was left under the bed, the film creaks into slo-mo. The audience becomes aware of every second passing, as she runs to grab the phone and make it back into the room, while the criminals pursue her. Honestly, “Panic Room” never quite tops that moment of suspense. 

As hard as “Panic Room” works to add as much variety as possible to its simple premise, the movie eventually can only go so far. After the switcharoo happens, and the crooks end up inside the titular place, “Panic Room” has officially run out of ideas. Meg is left to go around the house, swinging a sledge hammer and brandishing a gun. A pair of cop stop by the door and her ex-husband briefly wanders into the story. These moments aren't bad. It just represents “Panic Room” winding down to its most reasonable conclusion. It turns out that the long-distance stand-off between Meg and her captors are a lot more compelling than the inevitable confrontation. I guess because we can assume that the movie isn't going to kill off its main character so close to the end.

Another way that “Panic Room” reminds me of “Wait Until Dark” is how much the thieves bicker among themselves. It's established very early on that these three men have clashing personalities. Junior is only after the money, being completely callous and mercenary in his goals. When things become too difficult, he decides to just get up and leave. Burham is a blue collar professional, who doesn't want to hurt anyone and is constantly drawn more into violent acts he wants nothing to do with. The mysterious Raoul, meanwhile, is quickly established as a psychopath who sees homicide as the quickest solution to any issue. Watching these three bounce off each other isn't just fun, it's also part of why “Panic Room” can keep the tension going for as long as it does.

Jodie Foster has starred in a long line of thrillers, especially ones where she slinks around tight enclosed areas. (She would star in “Flightplan” a few years after this one.) She's good at this kind of thing, is my point. That's because Foster is equally adapt at projecting a sense of vulnerability and strength. When she's first locked into the room and is hyperventilating, it's clear how defenseless she is. Yet the hard-edged, no-nonsense angle Foster always brings with makes the moments when she fights back pretty damn effective too. A young Kristen Stewart, many years before she became a star in her own right, stars as Sarah and has a nice sarcastic edge to her dialogue. Watching her and Foster trade barbs is very entertaining. 

The two stars are fine but, one admits, that the burglars are the more colorful roles. Forest Whitaker is in the juicy role of a seemingly good person who is doing a very bad thing. The conflict that he feels every second he's doing this act is evident in Whitaker's layered, nuanced performance. Jared Leto, reappearing from “Fight Club,” plays Junior. This is an excellent use of Leto's smugness, that pretty boy sense of superiority he carries with him in everything. (And seemingly in real life too.) Dwight Yoakam, with his wild eyes and wispy hair and bad teeth, is very good at projecting an air of unsteady danger. From the moment we meet Raoul, we know that he is unstable and dangerous. 

”Panic Room” had a tricky production. The film was originally meant to star Nicole Kidman. After two weeks of filming, she injured herself and had to be replaced with Foster. Fincher swapped cinematographers early into filming and Stewart was also a last minute replacement, for Hayden Panettiere. None of the behind-the-scenes turmoil is apparent in the extremely slick final product. “Panic Room” might be too slick at times, honestly, but it still proves to be a fairly involving thriller that keeps the fire burning for long enough of its run time to be considered a success. Fincher did his damnedest to elevate a “popcorn” thriller. The result is, perhaps, not the most thematically rich film of his career but still a reasonably effective one. [Grade: B]