Panic Room: Movie Review (2008)

(Editor's Note: Seeing Twilight reminded me that Kristen Stewart was in Panic Room. The following review is from the archives.)


Directed by David Fincher, written by David Koepp, 112 minutes, rated R.

From its terrific opening title sequence of block letters hovering high alongside Manhattan’s towering skyscrapers to its sweeping, digitally enhanced journey through the walls, nooks and crannies of an Upper West Side mansion, David Fincher’s “Panic Room” is the definitive answer for those wondering whatever happened to style in today’s movies.

It’s right here.

The film, from a script by David Koepp (“Stir of Echoes”), might not be as good as Fincher’s “Fight Club” and “Se7en,” but it makes his weakest film, “The Game,” truly look rigged.

Technically flawless yet emotionally sterile, “Panic Room” is a great-looking thriller with clear echoes of Hitchcock whose only shortcoming is that it doesn’t offer audiences a shred of substance to help beef up its thinly realized characters and its serviceable plot.

The film stars Jodie Foster as Meg Altman, a wealthy, recently divorced mother who buys a cavernous West Side brownstone once owned by an eccentric billionaire--a man so paranoid about his safety, he outfitted the house with a reinforced steel cubicle known as a panic room.

It’s here, in this snug, protective vault linked to the outside rooms through a number of cameras and television monitors, that one would hurl oneself should burglars come creeping in the middle of the night--as they do during Meg’s first night in the house.

In a rousing, virtuoso series of events, Meg, along with her teen-age daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart), must escape into the safe confines of the panic room before three crooks --played by Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakam in varying degrees of evil--reach them first.

If you’ve seen the television ads or the trailer, you know Meg and Sarah reach the panic room.

But what you might not know is that what these men want is a hidden stash of cash buried deep inside that room.

Naturally, since Meg and Sarah aren’t budging, complications ensue.

Recalling elements of “Rear Window,” “Dial M for Murder” and especially “Wait Until Dark,” the 1967 Terence Young thriller starring Audrey Hepburn, “Panic Room” is a slick, compelling piece of hysteria peppered with enough twists and turns to keep its focus away from Koepp’s stilted dialogue and the script’s questionable lapses in logic.

You won’t come away feeling that you know any of these characters, as you do in the best thrillers, but with Fincher turning on the technical heat, you will feel as if you experienced a terrifying moment in their lives.

Grade: B


View the trailer: