Film Studies: Don't panic, it's just Fincher at his best

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David Fincher: interview

Panic Room: review

David Fincher's Panic Room opened all over America last Friday, and by now it will have established itself as the first real movie of 2002. From the moment it begins, you know that Fincher is crazy about the medium and so excited about this subject he can scarcely breathe. Or think. You only notice the lack of thought later – yet it's a handicap. Never mind, Panic Room is that rare modern commodity: a single-minded entertainment that knows what it wants to do and how to do it. The task? To scare us shitless.

Jodie Foster has just divorced her husband, a wealthy pharmacist who found another woman. But Jodie has a rich settlement and the daughter to look after, so she goes house-hunting on the West Side of Manhattan.

As they explore the available property on 94th Street, so an unusual character enters movie history, that of a swell four-storey townhouse, stripped bare of furniture. From the moment he gets inside, Fincher starts to play like a puppy with a new toy. The camera oozes in and out of corners; it soars up the staircases; it Steadicams across the kitchen, threading a path through the handle on a kettle. The camera is wild about the space, and the quietly sinister shadows that grow there. Long before you learn why, you begin to feel menace in the home.

It's vital to the cunning of David Koepp's screenplay that danger and security live in the same place. The snooty estate agent is impressed when Foster realises that the evident spaces don't quite fit on one floor. Is there a hidden room? The agent presses a button and a four-inch steel door slides open, revealing the panic room, an impenetrable recess, with phone, multiple TV screens to cover the parts of the house, and emergency supplies.

Well, Jodie and the daughter go to sleep on their first (rainy) night in the house, and three guys break in. The baddies didn't know the new owners were installed yet. They thought they had time to find the treasure that is hidden – in the panic room. Except that Jodie and the kid just get there first. You'd think they were safe. But there are problems: Jodie hadn't switched on the panic room phone yet. And the daughter is diabetic. She's going to need a shot some time soon.

There is no ulterior meaning to Panic Room that I could detect, which is worth stressing as David Fincher's previous films – Fight Club, The Game, Seven, Alien 3 – have been heavy with allegory, metaphor or gloomy societal import. They've also carried an oppressive foreboding and a nasty sense of human nature that identified Fincher as an authentic misanthropist.

One of these hoodlums is unpleasant, but with nothing like the malice that irradiates the Kevin Spacey character in Seven. And while Panic Room is often very frightening, and always suspenseful, there is no deeper significance or lesson. This is a simple if intricate game of survival and wits.

The considerable (if superficial) beauty of the movie comes in Fincher's taunting use of space, a tracking camera, extraordinary lighting (shared by Conrad Hall and Darius Khondji) and an uninhibited play upon stress. If there can be such a thing, this is pure suspense: we are so caught up in the mechanics of tension and surprise that we don't ask the characters to be any deeper. Granted that, it is a delight to find Jodie Foster (a late replacement for an injured Nicole Kidman) back to her best. Asked to be as smart as her real self, asked to join in love affairs, asked to go to Siam, Ms Foster can look pretty helpless on screen. But expose her brave, flaring face to unfair pressure (as in The Silence of the Lambs) and she rises to the occasion.

The more interesting question is where this leaves Fincher. For some time now it's been clear that he has exceptional skill or talent with a camera. There were questions, however, about whether he could control his narratives or his considerable pessimism. Well, everything is under control here, and the result will be a hit on a scale that wins Fincher liberty. God knows the ordeal he plans for us next.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk