A Film Canon

Opening with a spectacular credit sequence, set against New York's architectural screens, Panic Room offers an idiosyncratic and antiquated 'townstone' as protagonist, bought by Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart), after a painful divorce. This "extremely rare amount of space" is extraordinary for its height, number of stairs, ancient elevator and, finally, its second, stationary elevator - the panic room, located on the top floor, which electronically surveils everything beneath it. When three criminals (Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakam) break in, intent on recovering the money that's supposedly hidden somewhere in the house, the stage is set for a home invasion chamber drama for the digital age - and, more specifically, an attempt to fulfill the cinematographic horizon glimpsed by George Cukor's Gaslight, which David Koepp's classicist script and narrative subtly references. Like Cukor, Fincher starts with a fairly straightforward vertical preoccupation with the house, an attempt to atmospherically condense it to so many vertical sight-lines. However, verticality is rapidly abstracted - as evinced in the free-fall horizontal tracking-shots, in which we're encouraged to gaze down, rather than across space - into a more general, vertiginous quality. Combined with a seamlessly integrated CGI component that allows the camera to pan from the granular to the panoptic in a matter of seconds, the result is gaseous cinematography - a conception of a distributed camera, or of narrative trajectory as an extended decompression, both finding their closest approximation in the panic room screens. Visually, it imbues the film with an elusively palpable tactility, producing a ripple that can almost be smelled or felt before it can be seen, in an effort to envisage a cinematic hyper-realism - a poetic vehicle for Foster's hyper-real, dispersed acting style, her ability to be incandescently everywhere.