Room with a viewer

Panic Room Odeon George St. Friday 17 – Thursday 23 October It’s always worth watching the opening credit sequence in a David Fincher film. Unlike most directors, he understands the subliminal artistic potential of these initial moments. Just think of the superbly jittery start to Se7en. Panic Room’s credits similarly function as the movie’s overture: a montage of New York skyscrapers recalls the beginning of Clare Dolan or, more recently, Vanilla Sky (the close-up of the modern cityscape’s concrete bastions as ironic short hand for human insecurity); the names of the cast and crew slide in huge letters over these grey surfaces, foreshadowing the rigid contours of the panic room around which Fincher’s camera later circles. The tone is tight, clinical, as such paving a perfect path for the movie. But it’s precisely this cold discipline which ultimately lets the film down. Because Panic Room is really nothing more than a brutally efficient genre piece, admittedly with much fun to be had along the way. It retains the self-conscious playfulness of previous effort The Game – it’s unmistakably a Fincher film. We’ve relocated from Tyler Durden’s squat in Fight Club, from the dingy tenements of Se7en, to an enormous uptown brownstone; but the atmosphere remains just as dark and claustrophobic – if not more so, given the static location. The camera prowls through rooms, glides round corners and, in one neat move, plunges down a stairwell. I especially enjoyed the burglars’ initial break-in, as the lens squeezes through a keyhole and burrows through walls, giving visual voice to the breach of Meg’s (Jodie Foster) home. As always, Fincher makes his camera speak. References to other films abound. Meg and Sarah (Kristen Stewart) form a strikingly androgynous pair, calling to mind the shaven-headed Ripley and her charge Newt from Aliens (Fincher’s big-screen debut being Alien3). It’s difficult, too, not to remember Agent Starling’s nervous, sinewy determination in The Silence of the Lambs. When initially looking round the property, Sarah trundles over its floorboards on a scooter, echoing Danny’s tricycle-powered exploration of the empty hotel in The Shining. There’s even a dash of Home Alone in the mix. Still, I doubt whether, without the constant sawing of cellos in the background, my palms would have got quite so sweaty. The first half hour is slow; the narrative lurches from one set piece to another. You get the feeling that Fincher, like the burglars, spent much of the shoot rubbing his chin and wondering what to do next. Nor does David Koepp’s lame script help, with its incoherent blend of comedy and horror. It does manage, however, some effectively knowing lines. “It’s a very emotional property,” the estate agent says to Meg. How right he is. It’s ironic, then, that, although edgy, the film itself is never “emotional”. We don’t get to know any of the characters, least of all Meg and her daughter: one’s claustrophobic, the other diabetic; that’s it. Consequently, it’s left to the visuals, soundtrack and intrinsic panic-factor of the set scenes to get us going; at no point do we really care about the characters themselves. I’m sure it’s possible to dredge up some thematic content to Panic Room – mother/daughter relationships, voyeurism (CCTV cameras feature prominently), the invasion of privacy. But in the end it amounts to little more than high-grade multiplex fodder. The difference, merely, is that it’s Fincher who’s feeding us.ARCHIVE: 1st Week MT2003