House Boo-tiful

Elevate Me Later: Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart flee Jared Leto in Panic Room.

Panic Room offers a few scares, but we've been down these halls before.

by Cindy Fuchs

Panic RoomDirected by David Fincher A Columbia Pictures release Opens Friday at area theaters

Movies that begin with someone moving into a new house always end badly. What happens in between can range from harrowing to tedious, from the ghosts in The Shining or The Amityville Horror to the miserable Vietnam War flashbacks afflicting poor William Katt in House. The point here is that you have to connect with the character being harassed; otherwise, scary-house movies can be tiresome.

Panic Room starts with Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) looking at a cavernous, multi-floored house on New York's Upper West Side. Accompanied by her already-bored, scooter-riding daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart), Meg nods along with her chatty real estate agent, Lydia (Ann Magnuson): Yes, the place is fabulous, but it's also very expensive. No matter -- buying the house is apparently the best way Meg can come up with to get back at her slimeball of a husband, Stephen (Patrick Bauchau), a pharmaceuticals millionaire who's taken up with a younger woman. The house is all ominous shadows and hardwood floors, but by far its most ominous aspect is its "panic room," with a thick steel door that slams shut with an alarming thwack, a bank of surveillance monitors (all shooting from sharp, high angles, of course), and cases filled with bottled water and fireproof blankets.

Meg and Sarah both think this room is a tad creepy, but given the film's title, well, the film efficiently jumps to their first night in the house, complete with thunder and lightning and, oh yes, a trio of home invaders -- security-systems expert Burnham (Forest Whitaker), twitty mastermind Junior (Jared Leto) and ski-masked "muscle" Raoul (Dwight Yoakam). They want millions of dollars hidden in the titular room, and so, quick as you can say, "Get out!" Meg and Sarah are locked inside said room, and the three guys are locked out, which means that they'll be spending the next 90 minutes trying to hammer, drill, gas and unscrew their way in. For a little while, the females listen to these sounds and watch the monitors in horror (no working phone inside the room, of course). Meg's momentarily claustrophobic, but gets over it; then it becomes clear that Sarah is diabetic and drat! -- she left her kit in her bedroom.

Just as it sounds, David Koepp's screenplay is thin. You can't help but know what's going to happen here. The boys surprise each other but no one else: Raoul is a short-tempered thug, Junior a mealy-mouthed scum (Leto's uninspired "accent" is key to this characterization), and Burnham a generally nice guy with a family to support (apparently, designing security systems doesn't pay so well). The girls are equally predictable: initially mopey and stiff, Meg turns out to be an agile action hero, most excellent at the dramatic slow-motion dash, and handier with a sledgehammer than she could have imagined; even Sarah gets scrappy with a few leftover needles. And a couple of cops who come by are tediously slow on the uptake.

In lieu of plot or character, then, Panic Room offers the house. It's a good house, even if Meg should never ever have moved in, even a spectacular house. As assembled on screen by director David Fincher (and cinematographers Conrad Hall and Darius Khondji, along with designer Arthur Max), it's punctuated by grim shadows, doorways that loom in low-angle shots, windows that look out on the rainy street, and all those video cameras in every-which corner. Since Meg and Sarah have only just moved in, there's precious little domestic detail, save for Meg's claw-footed tub (a must for all gothic-inclined mansions), a bike and a pizza box in the kitchen, and a soccer ball conveniently located so that it might be kicked loudly down the stairs at a crucial moment.

The most effective aspect of the house is its breakaway architecture, allowing the camera to snake up and down stairs, travel through floors and walls, up and down stairways and, in one sensational shot, creep over a couple of counters and through a kitchen portal. Still, as beautiful and well-used as the space is, midway through the film, it starts to feel less spooky than vacant. Panic Room's visual organization is surely precise -- you always know where the characters are in relation to the house and each other -- but it overwhelms a more crucial anxiety and dread.

Worse, the film comes around to a kind of very conventional moral neatness that's unusual in a Fincher film. While it surely raises significant questions about the relations between security and money, in a world where such relations have turned suddenly tenuous (and granted, the film was made before Sept. 11), it never pushes hard at the assumption of privilege that grounds these relations. This is built into Panic Room's fundamental premise: The rich folks have to come out on top.