Panic Room

Every so often an off-the-wall director plays it straight. Sometimes it blunts their edge, like Robert Altman's Grisham-by-numbers adaptation of The Gingerbread Man. Sometimes it produces an entrancing oddity, like David Lynch's The Straight Story. However sometimes it brings out the best of the director, and Panic Room is a solid gold example of this, with David Fincher's class written through the film like 'Blackpool' through a stick of rock.

The story revolves around Meg, a recent divorcee who moves into a cavernous property in Manhattan that looks for all the world like the dream property to take care of her daughter Sarah in. However on their first night in the house a trio of burglars break in and a stand-off ensues with Meg and Sarah trapped in an impenetrable bunker in the middle of the house (the titular Panic Room) while the burglars try to get in to access a hidden safe.

It is the greatest credit to the cast, writer and director that a stock genre situation is executed in such a fresh and vital light throughout. From Forrest Whittaker's compromised morality to Jared Leto's drug addicted craziness each role seems so real it would be an injustice to attempt to describe them in a few lines. These are not characters, these are people and people can only be defined in a few sentences by a great artist, and there is definite evidence of greatness at work here.

However where the film finds real depth is in the character of Meg. After Nicole Kidman withdrew because of injuries sustained during Moulin Rouge, Jodie Foster was brought in and the character of Meg toughened up and made less glamourous. This change in the character opens up completely different areas of the film. With her husband having left for a young model, Kidman would have lent the film an air of rejected fragile beauty being slowly crushed before finding her inner strength.

However with Foster's tougher screen persona we have the struggle of the rejected woman trying to re-assert her ability to function in the world alone, determined not to lose any dignity along the way. Given the trust of writer and director, Foster lets her body do all the acting and gives a master class in showing how dialogue should illustrate everything the character isn't saying.

Despite having a couple of scenes which will have viewers screaming at the screen because of the characters irrational behaviour, it is hard to find fault with David Koepp's taught script. However without FincherÕs obsessively bleak vision to give it an edge Panic Room would have been another slick forgettable thriller, like the Koepp scripted Snake Eyes, instead it is classic film-making that deserves the title of 21st century Hitchcock in ways Brian De Palma can only ever dream of.

David Goody