PANIC ROOM
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Review by Luke Buckmaster Rating (out of 5): 
David Fincher puts his
audience in the Panic Room for his latest film, a claustrophobic
thriller starring Jodie Foster and Forrest Whittaker in the two main
roles. Framing his
essentially one-setting cat and mouse game with the kind of visual
virtuoso that juiced up the elements of his previous film Fight
Club, Fincher (whose other credits are Alien 3, Se7en
and The Game) ordered an electronic duplication of the mansion in
which Panic Room is based, to achieve panning and tracking shots
that would have been physically impossible otherwise. The overall effect is a
movie that may have come across as something trivial if not for its
knockout stylistics, and a good script from writer David Koepp (Jurassic
Park, Carlitos Way, Mission: Impossible).
Fincher provides the screenplay with a focused intimacy he’s
never settled with before, content with one primary setting, a handful of
characters, no trippy reality checks and no running social commentary –
so Panic Room isn’t a film “about” anything.
Instead he focuses on pace, deliberation, style and ill-matched
characters, the kinds of elements at the heart of the
“rules of suspense,” a set of genre guidelines invented by the
old master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, who believed creating
suspense for the screen was a lot like performing a puppet show: you need
to know precisely when to pull the right strings. Fincher seems to have a
good understanding of when to push his audiences and when to back off, and
his work resembles Hitchcock thrillers like Rear Window, which was
an obvious inspiration for Panic Room.
Yes, it’s a big call, but there are noticeable similarities from
the start: the film’s effective opening credits, in which the cast and
crew’s names are arranged according to the positioning of city
skyscrapers and buildings, embodies much more than just a passing
resemblance to the opening images of North by Northwest and (to a
lesser extent) Psycho. With
a jaunty, dramatic score and a bunch of carefully chosen establishing
shots, Fincher sets the tone for Panic Room perfectly in his
opening images, allowing the audience to expect exactly what they’re
going to get: a homage to the Hitchcock thriller, but also a text that
stands on its own, using the source of its inspirations not for laborious
borrowing or mimicking but as a launch pad to springboard new ideas. Fincher is also working
with a genre that is potentially one of the biggest box office drawcards:
the Hollywood high concept film.
Koepp’s simple premise is a marketing and publicity delight, but
finding out about the room is not what the story is about.
You see, a panic room is the latest craze in high-tech home security in
America – it is a small room sized strongbox (in this case, attached to
a master bedroom) reinforced by concrete and steel barriers, making it an
impenetrable fortress. Inside is a toilet, food and provisions, an outside phone
line and bunch of screens for each of the home’s security cameras, which
are in almost every room. We are given the tour
of the panic room and the rest of the featured house at the very beginning of the film, in which recently divorced wife Meg
Altman (Jodie Foster) decides that the place is perfect for herself and
her 12 year old daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart).
We also learn in the same sequence that Jodie is claustrophobic and
Sarah has insulin dependant diabetes, two facts which will inevitably
cause friction later on. During the first night
living in their new home, three thieves – Forrest Whittaker, Jared Leto
and Dwight Yoakam – break into the house, believing it to be unoccupied.
They are there to pull off a job that’s going to make them rich,
because the previous occupant (recently deceased) was a millionaire who
left a very valuable treasure behind.
When Jodie wakes up in the middle of the night and discovers three
unwelcome men in her brand new mansion (complete with an indoor elevator),
she grabs the kid and flees – and guess where they hide?
Only problem is, what the thieves want is inside the Panic Room
with them. So the action begins
from what seems like the ultimate stalemate, with neither side willing to
surrender to the other. An
intellectual game ensures between the two opposing camps, and when you
realise that the film isn’t going to cheat – i.e. no supernatural
themes, no ludicrous feats of the human body – it becomes a treat to
take an observers role in the process and try to predict each players
moves and countermoves, and how Fincher might forge closure.
Roger Ebert likened the scenario pitched in Panic Room to a
chess game, where “the board and all of the pieces are in full view,
both sides know the rules, and the winner will simply be the better
strategist.” The characters are the
pawns in the film, constructed to play out their respective roles whilst
Fincher flirts with the rules of suspense.
A bunch of good performances give them vivid presence, and the
script allows some reasonably sophisticated characterisations, delving
from the predictable but threatening shallow villain (Dwight Yoakam) to an
interesting portrayal of the moral villain (Forrest Whittaker, whose final
moments in the film with linger in the memory).
It’s the players’ moves and the knockout stylistics of the film that embrace its centrepiece attraction: a game of calculation and suspense where the audience becomes involved with the trepidation of the film’s pawns and their location on the board. If Fincher occasionally overwhelms his audiences with stylistic achievements when his content temporarily lacks, he can be forgiven for crafting highly engaging visual films that at their best explore some of the awesome techniques of modern cinema. In Panic Room David Fincher reverts back to a more fundamental approach to a movie, which relies wholly on the situations invented in one setting and which allows such lucrative visual treats as a camera shot that delves in and out of a keyhole. It is an achievement worth noting from a director who consistently shows little restraint for how his stories eventuate (and in particular, how they end) and Fincher may be able to sleep better at night with the plausible suggestion that if old Hitch was around nowadays, he’d sure enjoy this one.
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