Opinion

Panic Room

Recently-divorced Meg Altman and her daughter Sarah move into a Manhattan brownstone house which previously belonged to a reclusive financier. Among the house's many interesting features is a 'panic room', an impregnable space designed to protect the house's inhabitants in the event of burglary or home invasion. The room is equipped with a secure phone line, food and water, and video surveillance of the rest of the house. On the Altmans' very first night, thinking them not to have moved in yet, three men enter the house in search of a hidden fortune.

The fascinating career of director David Fincher takes another interesting turn with Panic Room, a combination of action movie and suspense thriller which takes many of the conventions of both those genres and makes them its own. As well as the suspense inherent in the concept, there's a genuine sense of creepiness created by the basic camera movements he employs here, as the camera track around the house, from room to room and floor to floor almost like an additional character. Add in the excellent performances he gets out of his performers, and he's put together a real winner.

Central to the film's success, too, is Foster's performance. In delivering a character study of a woman driven by extraordinary circumstances to discover resourcefulness and strength, she creates the character we'd all like to believe we would be in the same situation. She's not a pumped-up, Linda Hamilton-esque hero, but an ordinary woman who just has to find a way for her and her daughter to survive a night. Watching Foster in her first film in three years (since Anna And The King, in fact, at a very different end of the scale) makes you realise how much she's missed when she's away. Once again she demonstrates why she's one of the definitive film actors, and it's interesting to wonder what Nicole Kidman (arguably one of the others) would have made of the part if injury hadn't forced her out.

The other performances, especially Whitaker's, are all of a high standard, and everyone, no matter what side they're on, gives credibility to the sense that this situation is spiralling out of anyone's control.

There are a couple of weird moments where the logic falls down - I was asking the same question about disabling the security cameras that the bad guys do towards the end, and a diabetic of my acquaintance noted that she'd never known anyone diabetic who drinks full-sugar Coke, but generally it holds up well to scrutiny (yes, by the way, Sarah Altman is diabetic, and of course there's no insulin in the panic room....).

At the end of the day, this is not a movie with deep messages about the human condition or the nature of the universe. It's an action/suspense piece of fluff, but done with such energy and conviction that it's by far the best of its type to come along in a long while.