Wait, how did I miss a David Fincher movie? Yeah, there are probably a couple I haven’t seen, but I usually check his work out. Fincher is one of the best in the business when it comes to tight, suspenseful movies these days, full of smart characters doing smart things. Maybe it was just because Panic Room somehow looks rather…ordinary compared to his other work. Like, this seems like simple genre work with a perhaps overqualified lead actress in the form of Jodie Foster, and that was that. But I do like me some Fincher…
I’ll figure out later how one of Fincher’s ended up on Tubi, where I go for the weird stuff, later.
Recently divorced mom Meg Altman (Foster) is moving into a large brownstone in New York City with her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart). Normally, a house like this would be far too expensive for a woman like Meg, and it certainly is far too large for just two people, but Meg’s ex-husband is paying for the house, and he is rich. The house does include a panic room off the master bedroom along with a few other oddities for a house of its age, but by and large, it is a really nice place for the pair to move into as Meg is getting ready to go back to school at Columbia and needs somewhere a bit more practical to work out of.
But then a trio thieves break in on their first night, none of them expecting anyone to have moved in just yet. See, the previous owner left a lot of his fortune to, well, not his extended family. As such, there’s his grandson Junior (Jared Leto), panic room installer Burnham (Forest Whitaker), and hired muscle Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) coming in to find the dead man’s missing assets. Junior is a bit spoiled and greedy, Burnham wants the goods but doesn’t want to actually hurt anyone, and Raoul..well, he doesn’t mind hurting people. Problems come up for the thieves when Meg spots them and gets herself and Sarah into the panic room before the crooks, but there are some other issues there: the very thing the thieves are looking for are in the panic room, Meg is claustrophobic, Sarah is a diabetic, and no one inside or outside of the panic room really planned for this. The rest of the movie is an elaborate game of cat-and-mouse as both sides work with what resources they have to get what they want.
Oh man, was this good. I mean, I thought it would be, and I generally trust Fincher, but I loved how this movie turned out. The individual characters may not be particularly deep, but there aren’t any slouches in the cast, and that includes the handful of minor characters. What this sort of movie is instead is a smart script paired with a talented director. Yes, there’s room for the actors, especially Whitaker as the most benevolent of the three thieves, to show off some nuance in their roles, but that doesn’t mean these are particularly deep characters. Foster’s character is a concerned mother. She and Stewart’s Sarah depend on each other to work together to get things done. Meanwhile, the three thieves each have different approaches to both life and the crime, and they show it off as they go. Whether it’s Leto’s privileged idiot or Yoakam’s borderline psycho, there’s a lot for the actors to do to give their roles some definition.
But really, this is Fincher’s movie, and his camera, often swooping through the house from the inside as Burnham and Junior try to find a way in or cutting the audio for Meg to dash out of the panic room while the three are arguing to try and grab her mobile phone. This sort of thing is really in Fincher does well, and fans of his work should check out this movie for that reason alone. Is it as good as, say, Fight Club or Se7en? No, but it doesn’t need to be, and I was very pleased with it all the same.
Grade: A
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