By Robert Scucci
| Published
Most subgenres fall into the same trap because certain beats and motifs have to be utilized. That’s what subgenres are. The pitfall that lesser films fall into is not knowing how to elevate a premise that’s inherently derivative, which is why there are so many dime-a-dozen psychological thrillers, slashers, and, in the case of 2002’s Panic Room, home invasion flicks.
But here’s the thing about David Fincher, the film’s director: he’s insanely good at taking a concept that seems boilerplate at face value and elevating it in a way that keeps it interesting. Panic Room, for all intents and purposes, is contrived. It’s stock by design. It’s a story about three guys breaking into a house where a woman and her pre-teen daughter live alone, and then fighting for survival with whatever limited resources they have at their disposal.
Panic Room Is Shot Like No Other Home Invasion Flick
If you’re a fan of thrillers, you probably lost count of how many home invasion flicks you’ve watched because they all start blending together. David Fincher knew this, so he flipped the entire subgenre on its head by going for a “cameraless” effect that allowed him to shoot impossibly long tracking shots that appear to happen in one unbroken take. His goal was to imply that “there’s no camera operator, no crew, and no track,” meaning the camera could go anywhere.
The result is a series of shots that start in the downstairs kitchen, work their way through cabinets, walls, and air ducts, push up winding flights of stairs, and, in some cases, float through the ceiling into the floor above. What’s most impressive is that, for a 2002 production, the computer-generated imagery never breaks the immersion. Like The Shining, it’s almost as if we’re seeing the entire story unfold from the house’s perspective, which allows the viewer to keep tabs on every character like a fly on the wall hopping from room to room undetected.
This shooting method is what makes Panic Room a cut above its contemporaries because no other home invasion film looks quite like this one. Coupled with David Koepp’s tight screenplay and the talent of its small cast, what would otherwise be a simple premise becomes a Hitchcockian nightmare that keeps you watching because it all feels so fresh.
A Yawn-Fest In Theory, A Masterclass In Practice
I’ll keep the synopsis brief here because Panic Room, like most home invasion plots, really doesn’t have much going on. How these things escalate is what really matters.
When Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) moves into a new NYC home with her 11-year-old daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart), they’re surprised to learn that the home’s previous owner, an eccentric millionaire, had an impenetrable panic room built in the master bedroom complete with closed-circuit televisions, a hard-wired telephone, and food rations. The day gets away from our protagonists, and Meg falls asleep before finishing the setup of some of the communications devices in the miniature bunker.
As luck would have it, three criminals, Junior (Jared Leto), Burnham (Forest Whitaker), and Raoul (Dwight Yoakam), have been casing the joint because the previous owner was Junior’s grandfather, and Junior has reason to believe millions of dollars are hidden inside the secret room.
They show up in the middle of the night while Meg and Sarah are sleeping, but Meg wakes up, realizes they’re being robbed, grabs Sarah, and retreats to the panic room so she can collect her thoughts and figure out her next move. The emergency phone line isn’t properly set up, but she can still communicate with the criminals through the intercom, and they refuse to leave until they get what they came for.
That’s the entire plot to Panic Room. Like I said, pretty standard stuff because if you’ve seen one home invasion movie, you’ve pretty much seen them all.
Why It’s A Cut Above
The movie really starts cooking when we get frantic shots from the house’s perspective, showing us where the criminals are wandering, what Meg and Sarah are seeing through the closed-circuit cameras, and creating a palpable amount of tension during the scenes that really matter, like when Meg realizes she dropped her cellphone near her bed before locking down and starts calculating whether she can run out, grab it, and make it back to safety.
It’s not just the “camera” work in Panic Room that seals the deal, however, because the criminals constantly getting into it with each other adds additional layers of tension to the mix. Jared Leto is perfect as the entitled loudmouth with a Napoleon complex because he genuinely believes he deserves his grandfather’s bearer bonds. He’s so unlikeable and shortsighted that he brings along Raoul to help with the job, something Burnham isn’t thrilled about from the jump.
So we have an unhinged, idiotic leader and an unpredictable bruiser willing to take extreme measures, including killing the family in the house, if he has to. That leaves Burnham, the only criminal with a conscience. The reason he’s valuable to Junior is because he installs safe rooms for a living and potentially knows how to crack them if he can properly size up the job. His reluctance to follow through makes the dynamic work because nobody was supposed to be in the house that night, and he genuinely feels terrible about how complicated things have become for Meg and Sarah.
In an ideal world, the robbery would have been a victimless crime. Three guys break into a home that nobody has moved into yet and steal money from a dead guy that nobody else knows exists. The alleged simplicity of the job compared to how the evening actually plays out makes the whole thing feel exponentially more disastrous because now Meg and Sarah are fearing for their lives, especially when the zero-hour trope gets added to the mix in the form of Sarah needing insulin to prevent her from falling into a diabetic coma.
Every single beat and setup in Panic Room is derivative. Every single escalation is expected. Every single trope is celebrated. But the movie never feels like a slog to get through. You go into this movie knowing exactly how it’s going to end, but it’s such a wild ride getting there that you simply do not care that you’ve seen so many different versions of this same story before.
If there’s one thing that took me out of the movie, it was how quickly Meg adapted to certain situations. Not because I don’t believe in the concept of a strong, independent woman or anything like that, but because your average person simply isn’t going to be this prepared for a home invasion, especially one that starts while they’re sleeping. There’s no way to practice for this kind of scenario, especially in a house you literally moved into earlier that day.
Still, if the only thing that really bothers me is the fact that somebody learned the floor plan to their own house faster than I ever reasonably could, I’d say Fincher and company did a hell of a job here.
Panic Room holds up nearly 25 years later for all of these reasons. It’s a run-of-the-mill story that feels completely original because of the creative choices behind its production. Jared Leto getting put in his place by his much bigger, much more intimidating henchman also put a smile on my face, because why wouldn’t it?
As of this writing, you can stream Panic Room on Hulu.
