Panic Room **** (2002, Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart, Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, Dwight Yokam) – Classic Movie Review 591

Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart (just 12) star in 2002 as Meg and Sarah Altman, a young divorcée and her diabetic daughter who buy a gorgeous, huge, fancy New York apartment, a brownstone mansion that boasts a weird and wonderful feature in a steel-encased secret safe room to hide valuables, complete with CCTV.

Jared Leto, Dwight Yokam and Forest Whitaker also star as a trio of bumbling burglars who on the women’s first night in the flat break in to find a missing fortune in cash. Mum and child must now fight for their lives. Meg makes a move to the panic room, but the crooks know where she is and what they want is in that very room.

This bright, lively and intriguing, if highly improbable, idea is turned into a very smart, scary and exciting thriller. Though the movie is as artificial and glossy as the Hollywood apartment set it takes place in, director David (Se7en) Fincher kicks it into touch with style and conviction. None of the very considerable production difficulties shows up on screen in an ultra-smooth ride. Unusually, all the indoor scenes (and that’s most of the film, apart from the start and finish) were shot in sequence.

It’s a compliment to say that Panic Room plays out exactly like one of Hitchcock’s stagey, setbound movies, particularly Dial M for Murder, Rope or Rear Window. Though it carves out its own territory, the plot and characters bear resemblances to a couple of other setbound movies, Audrey Hepburn’s Wait Until Dark (1967) and Humphrey Bogart’s Desperate Hours (1955).

Pulling you on her side and stirring up the tension, Foster is great and Stewart is excellent as the equally feisty daughter. Their intense, sympathetic performances are the making of the movie, though Leto, Yokam and Whitaker are ideal too.

David Koepp’s original screenplay is taut and tense. He was inspired an article in The New York Times about safe rooms and getting stuck inside an elevator in his own brownstone. And the movie looks a treat thanks to Arthur Max’s production designs and extremely sleek cinematography by two of the best directors of photography in the business, Conrad W Hall and Darius Khondji (who lensed Fincher’s Se7en).

Hall took over when Khondji left the film two weeks into principal photography. Composer Howard Shore contributes a hauntingly dark, brooding score in his follow-up to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).

Foster was lucky enough to inherit the part when Nicole Kidman was injured during filming, and her voice is the one you can hear on the phone as the girlfriend of Foster’s ex-husband when Foster calls him for help. Eighteen days into the shoot, Kidman had to quit because of a recurring knee injury, suffered making Moulin Rouge! (2001).

Foster withdrew as president of the Cannes Film Festival jury to make the film. Stewart had replaced Hayden Panettiere just before the original shoot started.

Andrew Kevin Walker, the screenwriter of Se7en (1995), has a cameo as the sleepy neighbour.

Jodie Foster married her girlfriend, photographer Alexandra Hedison, over the Easter weekend in April 2014.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 591

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