Panic Room

Pretty, prosperous Causcasians in peril. That's the scenario of at least half the horror movies made in the last five years, and "Panic Room" hews closely to the established model. It gives us Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart), who buy a ludicrously well-appointed house on New York's Upper West Side (38 West 94th Street, for you inveterate tourists) that, as equipped with the titular high-tech safe haven, acts as a perfect setting for terror when three home invaders - security pro Burnham (Forest Whitaker), hothead Junior (Jared Leto) and trigger-happy Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) - come in looking for a stash of cash.

The name David Fincher in the director slot of a movie normally augurs quality, and he certainly shows some skills here: Fincher and some intrepid camera operators give the camera the position of narrator in some long, liquid shots that will truly tingle your spine, and Fincher certainly knows his timing and staging, setting up scarifying conflicts with effortless framing and crosscutting. But"Panic Room" is almost aggressively pointless, providing a series of potent thrills which yet add up to nothing and leave your mind the minute you leave the theater.

Part of the problem is screenwriter David Koepp; he thinks his script is leaving darknesses ominously unexplored by littering it with vague allusions to past sadnesses, but he doesn't really explore anything we see, either, with the result that the whole story feels like a series of ineffectual gestures.

Foster is naturally sympathetic as the victimized one, but Koepp doesn't make her character actually do anything much, except wear a top that leave her breasts hanging pendulously for the entire film. (It's hard to know if Fincher thought this was a funny sarcastic joke or entertaining on its own terms or what.) She runs and pants and screams, true, but there's nothing behind the standard horrific activities. Junior and Raoul are similarly underdrawn, handicapping the normally outstanding Yoakam and the normally tolerable Leto, neither of whom attain their usual level of performance here.

The only actor who actually manages invest this inadequate script with some humanity is Whitaker, whose sheer bear-like presence and natural pitiable gravity draw the audience in to him. It helps that Burnham doesn't seem to be into home invasion for the sheer opportunity to cause fright, like the somewhat inefficient Junior and Raoul, but for the proverbial big score. Of course, by the film's end he has received a far deeper and more painful humiliation than any of the other characters. And, frankly, it will not escape many people's attention that Whitaker's African-American character behaves more nobly than anyone could expect and still gets screwed in the end.

Not to spoil everything, but the final scene of the film shows Meg and Sarah preparing to find another cocoon, their previous palatial estate having been irreparably disturbed. But the sheer luxury of the shot - Central Park in autumn, rich reds and golds in the leaves and Foster bedecked in the usual deluxe all-black New York apparel - emphasizes how far they are not only from their travails, but from all the travails of normal people.

Some people may be able to shut out the sociological and narrative false steps and simply enjoy the regularly delivered thrills in "Panic Room." More power to them; these are some potent scares, even without anything behind them. But even the most dedicated horrorphiles will likely have a little twinge of class-conscious relief when viewing that final scene; after all, nothing like that could happen to most of us, because we have not attained such lofty heights from which to fall.

SAY, YOU'RE SOUNDING AWFULLY MARXIST THERE, ANDREW

I like to have plenty of analytical methods at my disposal, for the same reason that my dad has a whole room full of wrenches and spades and saws and such: each job you do calls for a different tool. Now, normally I do not get too terribly P.O.'ed about ultraluxury in the movies, though I do tend to note it when I can't figure out from the narrative why the main character has any money. (The main character in "The Time Machine" lived in a palatial suite on an assistant professor's salary, and I mentioned it.) But sometimes they just go ahead and throw in in your face, and the only way you're going to get that kind of thing off your mind is to declare class warfare on it. This movie is just ludicrous beyond belief about contrasting good rich people with bad poor people, and I'm not going to sit here and pretend it didn't happen even if most people won't care.

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