I was twelve years old when I first watched David Fincher’s Panic Room back in 2002, and somehow, I haven’t re-watched it since. To this day, I remember what my expectations were before seeing it, and they were quite silly. At that age, I wanted to watch an R-rated, adult version of Home Alone with plenty of violence; not an artfully-made, stripped-down home-invasion thriller full of superb performances. In other words, I wanted neither style nor substance; I wanted mayhem. The funny thing is, Fincher and screenwriter David Koepp disbursed plenty of mayhem throughout their movie, but I was simply too young to appreciate it, or really anything else the film does well. Nowadays, though, I’m at the age where I can see Panic Room for what it is: a premise that nearly reaches its full potential. Although, it is a fairly low threshold.

For those who haven’t seen it, Panic Room stars Jodie Foster as Meg Altman, an affluent woman who’s recently separated from her ultra-wealthy husband, Stephen (Patrick Bauchau). Along with her adolescent daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart), Meg moves into a spacious brownstone in NYC’s Upper West Side, replete with high-end amenities including a panic room. During Meg and Sarah’s first night in their new home, three burglars invade the property. Burnham (Forest Whitaker), Raoul (Dwight Yoakam), and Junior (Jared Leto) are after millions of dollars that the home’s previous owner left in its hidden safe. Alerted to their presence, Meg and Sarah flee into the panic room and seal themselves inside. The only problem is, the safe is in there with them, and the home invaders aren’t going to leave without the fortune it holds.

Upon re-watching this film, the first thing that struck me is how restrained its plot is. In 2002, Fincher was coming off Fight Club, a movie that’s so layered and kinetic that it borders on ostentatious. It’s quite apparent to me that Panic Room was meant to be a palate cleanser of sorts, as its one-building, stuck-in-a-room setting only allows for so much storytelling freedom – hence why I said earlier that its potential threshold is pretty low. In some ways, this simplicity is a negative, and I’ll get to that later. In other ways, however, it gave Fincher an uncommon amount of freedom to experiment with what he does best: framing scenes with nearly unparalleled precision. That, along with coaxing electric performances from his actors, is what I’ve grown to expect from Fincher, and that’s what he delivers here.

From its Hitchcockian opening credits to its sweeping, multiple-story transitions that seamlessly blend visual effects with practical camerawork, Panic Room is essentially an exhibit of every skill Fincher had acquired throughout the 90s. Working with a team of visual effects artists and two cinematographers, he crafts a four-story home that feels almost fully accessible to the viewer, which is appropriate considering the burglars have the same level of freedom within the house. His visual approach also means that the audience quickly understands the geography of the setting, which bolsters the tension-building during the cat-and-mouse moments of the third act. The only downside of Fincher’s aesthetic is that it occasionally feels excessive and even a little self-indulgent. Do we really need a tracking shot that travels up the home’s ventilation system from one room to another? Probably not, but maybe I’m just boring. Either way, to say that Panic Room is stylish is almost an understatement.

The visual flare doesn’t end with flashy camera movement and edits; there are also individual shots that are done so well, they almost make their filming look easy. For example, there’s a moment when Meg slides Sarah’s medicine bag into the panic room right as the door is closing. Sure, that sounds like a simple enough shot, but it must’ve required a load of takes to get it to look as smooth as it does. If there were only one or two shots like that, then I probably wouldn’t even ponder their difficulty, but Panic Room has so many, I couldn’t help but recognize how challenging this shoot must’ve been. And I’m sure I’ve missed a few flourishes. For instance, I didn’t even notice that Stephen has a broken collarbone during the movie’s violent climax. It’s only once I saw “puppeteers” in the credits that I looked it up and discovered that Fincher brought them in so they could control the shattered collarbone that bulges under his skin. It’s this kind of extreme, and gnarly, attention to detail that makes Panic Room such a pleasure to watch, especially for cinephiles.

In addition, Fincher is able to get the best out of his actors. Foster is an actress that can be hit-or-miss for me, but I think she’s well-cast here. Her grasp of both physical and mental grittiness makes her performance captivating to watch. Playing a woman dealing with her husband’s infidelity and her daughter’s unstable diabetes, she’s appropriately leery toward the male intruders and protective of her child. Speaking of her child, Kristen Stewart demonstrates maturity beyond her years and makes Sarah a believably clever yet vulnerable co-lead. Though both actresses have had long and productive careers, I’m not sure if either of them has ever been better than they are here. Or, rather, that I like them more than I do here.

Similarly, the villains give really solid performances. Whitaker is most noteworthy as both the most capable and kindhearted of the burglars. It’s ingenious how Fincher tries to make Burnham both enemy and ally to the good guys, and it mainly works because Whitaker has an implicit warmth that conveys through his tone and body language. Conversely, Yoakam is effective as the gun-toting Raoul because his acting is off-puttingly detached. It was a smart move by Fincher and Koepp to keep him in a balaclava, as the implications of wearing one are terrifying (i.e. he’s done this kind of stuff before, etc.). That said, it fell to Yoakam to strike the right notes, and he really does so throughout. Lastly, there’s Leto as Junior, the crack-smoking, misogynistic “leader” who concocted this crime for selfish reasons. His weaselly demeanor and erratic behavior seem to be right in Leto’s wheelhouse, given how authentically annoying his character feels. He’s another actor that’s really hit-or-miss for me, but like Foster, he’s a hit this time.

As good as it often is, Panic Room is frequently let down by Koepp’s script, which is satisfyingly spare but full of implausible or undeveloped elements. I appreciate how Koepp gets to the thrills as quickly as possible, avoiding prolonged exposition and still managing to establish who Meg and Sarah are both as individuals and as mother/daughter. That said, Meg needed to be a bit more uncertain of her course of action once the home invasion kicked off. She knows the criminals want inside the panic room, but we never see her question things further. She doesn’t openly ask herself: Is this a kidnapping, a robbery, or something even worse? Should I be concerned that two of the burglars are maskless and one isn’t? Perhaps these considerations and more go through her head, but they’re never vocalized or give her much pause, and so, they feel glossed over. On top of that, Meg knows the entire time that her daughter has severe diabetes (overused plot device) and regularly needs insulin (which they don’t have inside the panic room), so her leaving its confines is inevitable. This fact should’ve been better utilized to cultivate more tension, or at the very least, more confliction within the protagonist in regard to how far she’s willing to fight and thusly provoke the antagonists.

While I’m on the topic of the antagonists, I found it hard to buy half of the decisions they made. First and foremost, I can’t for the life of me figure out why Junior thought he needed Raoul for this burglary. He knows Raoul is a heavy, which one might need for crowd control during a heist, for instance. But Junior expects the brownstone to be vacant, so there’d be no cause to think a third man is needed, especially when he plans on screwing them out of most of the money. As the script acknowledges through Burnham, Junior’s plot to do so is incredibly stupid, but I don’t buy that he’s so dumb that he’d invite a gunman to a rudimentary burglary and then try to swindle him. The only explanation I can come up with is that he thought he needed a counterbalance to Burnham, in case they had to off him or something, but that’s pretty thin and merely speculation.

Surprisingly, Burnham calling out Junior’s stupidity isn’t even the film’s only example of self-awareness. Another implausible oversight is the baddies forgoing the simple process of destroying the home’s security cameras. Doing so would’ve rendered Meg and Sarah blind, therefore helping the burglars immensely. Later on, when Meg does that exact thing to hinder the villains, Raoul remarks, “Why the hell didn’t we do that?” I’ll admit, that’s a funny eye-wink to viewers who likely asked the same question at an earlier point in the movie. Look, if the bad guys had broken the cameras, then this fun cat-and-mouse story couldn’t have played out as it does. In this instance, it’s logical for the filmmakers to opt for laxity, plot-wise. It does negatively affect believability, though.

All of this being said, perhaps Panic Room’s greatest failure is that its premise is so basic, its auteur director never cuts loose and does something crazy with the story. And the strange thing is, Fincher seems to have recognized this deficiency going into the project. I mean, if he had thought the script was up to his level, would he have used every filmmaking trick in the book? Would he have made this movie an absolute clinic of ambience and style? I’m not so sure. Regardless, Fincher and the cast/crew did everything in their power to wring every last drop of drama and panache from an inconsistent screenplay. In the hands of lesser artists, I doubt that anything nearly this thrilling would’ve been produced. To put it another way, Panic Room is an example of turning grapes into wine, albeit a reasonably priced vintage of wine. Maybe that’s why I didn’t care for it when I was twelve. At that age, I would’ve picked grapes over wine every time. Now, well… I still prefer grapes. Shit, there goes my analogy.

Oh, and one last thing. For some reason, there’s still neither a Blu-ray nor a 4K Blu-ray of Panic Room available for purchase in the US. There have been rumors of an HD physical-media release coming down the pike for some time now, and yet, nothing has materialized. I hope that changes soon.