Film In a cold taste test, I would say that 'Panic Room' had been made in the late Eighties, early Nineties. It has the feel of those thrillers usually directed by Adrian Lynne, usually starring Michael Douglas, in which someone wealthy find their life crumblig around their eyes. Only the visual flourishes give it away, the most startling being a pull back across a kitchen through a coffee pot. something impossible in the days when Gless Close was going boiling rodents. The reason I point this out is that on the surface this for David Fincher this seems like a shockingly conventional piece in comparisson with his previous work ('Seven', 'The Game', 'Fight Club'). Look under the hood and we find something subtley different.
The credit sequence appears as words hovering in the air above Manhatten running parallel with the buildings; incredibly to look at. The whole film is set inside the house (other than a bit on the steps); cloustrophobic and echoey we feel the hopelessness of Jodie Foster as the world she can move about in becomes increasingly limited; it isn't affraid to make the bad guys complete dimwits -- yeah they may be dumb, but they have a gun; it plays about with the conventions of a thriller by making the main bad guy a man of concience; when Foster finally one-ups her advaries they deliciously realise it's in a way that they could have used themselves. I think I loved it.
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