Why David Fincher’s Panic Room Deserves More Attention

If you tell a casual movie fan that there’s a film out there, directed by the guy who made Zodiac and Gone Girl, starring three different Oscar winners and one of the most famous new stars of the 21st century, they’ll probably perk up a little bit. That’s an intriguing proposition even before you consider the rest of the talent involved, and the high-concept nature of the story, but somehow, Panic Room has always felt a bit overlooked.

In some ways, that sense that the film has been at least somewhat forgotten in the more than two decades since its release is understandable. It’s a thriller that relies on technology that felt shiny and new in 2002 but feels decidedly less so now; pretty much everyone involved has done bigger things in the time since its release; and its self-contained, original nature means that there’s no IP it can lean on. But David Fincher‘s fifth feature film, while not as epic in scope as many of his other successes, still deserves an audience. It’s been more than 20 years, and Panic Room has managed to hold up even better than the safe room of its title, standing as a tight, relentless little thriller that maximizes Fincher’s sense of directorial control over his environment. Whether you’ve never seen it at all or you haven’t seen it since it came out, it’s worth a watch, and it’s streaming on SYFY/USA right now. 

Why you should watch (or rewatch) Panic Room

David Fincher is, like Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, and Alfred Hitchcock before him, one of those directors who values complete control over every element of his production. He’s known for doing dozens of takes, shooting precisely, and working in a very detail-oriented way to get exactly the look he wants, which makes him the kind of filmmaker perfectly suited for a movie like Panic Room, though so few of Fincher’s other films follow the same formula. Written by legendary Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp, it’s a high-concept, single-location thriller that allows Fincher to visualize and harness every single aspect of its setting, to great effect.

The story is simple: Meg (Jodie Foster) and her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) move into a luxury brownstone in New York City after Meg’s divorce. The building, recently vacated by a very wealthy man, is equipped with a “panic room,” a safe room that features its own phone line, power supply, and surveillance cameras which allow the user to sit behind a steel-reinforced door and wait out any potential threat. Though Meg is skeptical of the technology, Sarah finds it comforting, and the pair settle in for their first night in their new home.

What they don’t know, of course, is that a group of thieves has already set their sights on the house, and on an apparent horde of cash stashed in a safe beneath the panic room. As Meg and Sarah fall asleep, Junior (Jared Leto), Burnham (Forest Whitaker), and Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) sneak into the house, thinking it’s still vacant. But when Meg wakes up and locks herself and Sarah in the panic room, the thieves are faced with a dilemma: How do they convince Meg to leave the one place in the house where she’s sure to be safe?

This is, to Koepp’s credit, a conceptually brilliant touch in a post-9/11 world, when Americans clung to traditional ideas of safety and security above all else, and the wealthy went out of their way to shore up their own wellbeing. Like many home invasion thrillers before it, it’s a film that asks the audience to imagine what they would do if the unthinkable happened. But then it goes a step further, making sure we understand that all the trappings of security that money can buy are sometimes no match for simple human frailty. 

There’s a deep well of emotional and thematic meaning to be gleaned from Panic Room and its ideas, from the way it treats its female heroines to the way it looks at class and wealth disparities and beyond. But the key to it all is how Koepp and Fincher root every theme, every arc, in the decisions the characters make when they’re in crisis. There’s not a lot of preamble here, and the entire cast — from legends like Foster and Whitaker to rising (at the time) stars like Leto and Stewart — digs deep to find the emotional truth in every thrilling moment, from a gas fire to an abbreviated but impossibly tense chase scene involving a cell phone.

Which, of course, brings us to Fincher, who might be the film’s real star. There are obvious nods to Hitchcock laced throughout the film, including a courtyard that looks like it was pulled straight from Rear Window, but what’s most Hitchcockian about the way Fincher approaches Panic Room might be the simple act of controlling every inch of the set. From the constant rain falling outside to the way the surveillance monitors inside the panic room function as filmmaking tools of their own, he’s clearly in his element, having a blast, and leaving nothing to chance. In a film about plans gone wrong, it’s clear that Fincher, even through adversity, knew exactly how to execute his own master plan. It’s not his best film, or his flashiest or most ambitious, but it is a great time for thriller fans, and a reminder of what top-tier talent can do when they’re placed within the invigorating limitations of a story like this one.

Panic Room is now streaming on the SYFY/USA Movies Hub.