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Panic Room is a 2002 American thriller film directed by David Fincher. The film stars Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart as a mother and daughter whose new home is invaded by burglars, played by Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, and Dwight Yoakam. The script was written by David Koepp, whose screenplay was inspired by news coverage in 2000 about safe room.
The film was Fincher's fifth feature film, following Fight Club (1999). Fincher and Koepp brought together a crew of people with whom each had worked with before. The house and its panic room were built on a Raleigh Studios lot. Nicole Kidman was originally cast as the mother, but she left after aggravating a previous injury. Her departure threatened the completion of the film, but Foster quickly replaced Kidman. The filmmakers used computer-generated imagery to create the illusion of the film camera moving through the house's rooms. Foster became pregnant during the shooting schedule, so filming was suspended until after she gave birth. The film's production cost .
The film was commercially released in the United States and Canada on , 2002. The film grossed on its opening weekend. In the United States and Canada, it grossed . In other territories, it grossed for a worldwide total of . The film was positively reviewed by critics, who commended Fincher's direction and Foster's performance. Panic Room has been analyzed for its exploration of gender and feminism, as well as its portrayal of surveillance technologies, diabetes, and mortality. The film has also been critiqued for its depictions of domesticity, race, real estate, ecological anxieties, and its thematic engagement with existential dread.
On Meg and Sarah's first night in the house, three men break in: Junior, the previous owner's grandson; Burnham, an employee of the home's security company; and Raoul, a thug recruited by Junior. They intend to steal locked inside a floor safe in the panic room.
When Meg wakes during the night, she sees the men on the security cameras and rushes to the panic room with Sarah. To force them out, the men pump propane gas into the room's air vents. Meg ignites the gas while she and Sarah cover themselves with fireproof blankets; the ignited propane leaves Junior badly burned. Meg taps into the main telephone line and calls her ex-husband, Stephen. As she tries to explain their situation, the intruders cut the line, ending the call.
When all attempts to breach the room fail, Junior gives up on the robbery but lets slip that there is more money in the safe than he initially disclosed. When he tries to leave, Raoul fatally shoots him and forces Burnham to continue with the robbery. Stephen arrives and is immediately taken hostage. Raoul severely beats him, ensuring that Meg sees it on the security camera. Sarah, a diabetes, suffers a seizure as her glucagon syringes are in her bedroom.
Raoul tricks Meg into thinking it is safe to temporarily leave the panic room. When she leaves to retrieve Sarah's medication, the men enter the room with Sarah inside. Meg throws the med kit in just as Burnham closes the door, inadvertently crushing Raoul's hand. She pleads with the men to give Sarah her medication, which Burnham eventually does. Two police officers arrive at the house, following up on Stephen's earlier 911 call and complaints from the neighbors. To protect Sarah, Meg convinces the officers that everything is fine, and they leave. Meanwhile, Burnham opens the safe and finds $22 million in bearer bonds inside.
As the men prepare to leave with Sarah as a hostage, Meg leads them into an ambush, using a sledgehammer to knock Raoul over a banister and into a stairwell. As Burnham flees, the injured Raoul crawls back up and overpowers Meg, preparing to bludgeon her with the sledgehammer. Hearing Sarah's terrified screams, Burnham rushes back and shoots Raoul, killing him. The police, alerted by Meg's earlier odd behavior, return in force and apprehend Burnham.
A few days later, Meg and Sarah search the newspaper for a new, smaller home, having recovered from their ordeal.
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Kristen Stewart stars as Sarah, Meg's diabetic daughter. Hayden Panettiere was originally cast as Sarah, but when she left the project toward the end of 2000, Stewart was cast in the role. Panic Room was Stewart's second feature film after The Safety of Objects (2001). When Kidman was cast as Meg, Fincher said Stewart was "to complement Kidman's, to be her antithesis, tomboyish, androgynous, dismissive, a teenager at ten years old. It was about the daughter being a parent to her mother." When Foster replaced Kidman, the character Meg was rewritten so she and Sarah would be similar.
Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, and Dwight Yoakam star as the film's burglars, Burnham, Junior, and Raoul, respectively. Whitaker's character Burnham was originally written to be "a slick, technical type" and the designer of the panic room in Meg and Sarah's home. Fincher did not think a designer could be persuaded to break into a home, so he rewrote the character to be a blue-collar worker who installs panic rooms for a living. The director told Whitaker to watch Key Largo (1948) and to emulate Humphrey Bogart's character. Whitaker said he liked Burnham's "conflicted" nature and preferred it to Raoul's villainy. Raoul was originally written to be "a giant scary hulking guy", but Fincher rewrote him to be "this wiry, mean kind of ex-con white trash guy". In one revised instance, Raoul punches Meg instead of slapping her to be reinforced as "an appalling character". The role of Raoul was originally offered to Maynard James Keenan, whom Fincher had directed in a music video for A Perfect Circle's "Judith". Keenan was too busy as the singer for Tool, so Fincher then offered the role to Yoakam, knowing him from his performance in Sling Blade (1996). For the role of Junior, Fincher cast Leto, who was in the cast of Fincher's previous film Fight Club (1999). As part of atypical class division, Junior is "the uptown rich kid", where Burnham is blue-collar, and Raoul is undefinable.
Patrick Bauchau had a minor role as Meg's ex-husband Stephen. Kidman, though she left the primary role due to her knee injury, had an uncredited off-screen role as the voice of Stephen's supermodel girlfriend. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, who contributed as writer for several of Fincher's previous films, had a cameo in Panic Room as a sleepy neighbor.
Fincher envisioned Panic Room as a about survival. His previous film Fight Club had 400 scenes and 100 locations, so he wanted to simplify the production of Panic Room. To this end, he wanted to focus production on a single set and to plan the scenes and shots thoroughly before the start of filming. Despite the preparation, he experienced difficulty in production with changes in the cast and the crew as well as the inherent inflexibility of his initial planning.
Fincher also saw Panic Room as a crime thriller similar to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), where money is "an object that everyone's after for the wrong reasons". The director was also interested in the story's conciseness of happening in one place and in one night, and how the screenplay was well-laid out to let the director decide a variety of shots and use of set-pieces. Fincher also saw the project as a way to be "in lock-step with the audience" in a change of pace from his previous films.
Koepp's screenplay emphasized pace over exposition. Koepp and Fincher agreed to streamline the film so the opening would introduce the characters as soon as possible. Fincher also sought to lay out the film so audiences could see characters make plans and thus be ahead of them, calling the tense foresight "a very cinematic notion". He wanted to track the different characters' agendas and to also keep scenes chronological, so he set up "computer-generated motion-control shots" to move the camera around the set. He planned scenes in which parallel scenes could be seen through the panic room's video monitors and also intercut between different characters. The final screenplay was similar in outline to the original one; there were minor changes in dialogue and specific moments, especially in the interaction between Meg and Sarah Altman due to Foster replacing Kidman. Explicit mention of Sarah's diabetes, such as the emergency syringe containing glucagon, were removed from the dialogue. Careful beverage intake, refrigerated medicine bottles, and Sarah's glucometer watch were intended as evidence of her diabetes.
Fincher sought to light his film less than most other films; he believed darkness contributed to the scare factor. Entering production, he initially planned to film the first half of the film in near-total darkness but decided that it required too much patience from audiences. Instead, he chose a "shadowy ambience" as a backdrop for Meg and Sarah Altman.
After two weeks of filming, at the end of January 2001, Kidman was injured on set. An x-ray revealed a hairline fracture underneath one of her knee joints. The fracture was an injury from Kidman's filming of Moulin Rouge! (2001), and the fracture had never fully healed. When Kidman left the project, Fincher continued filming scenes that did not include her character. During the same time of Kidman's departure, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild were threatening to strike over contractual disputes, so Fincher was pressured to re-cast the role of Meg Altman before it took place. Since the film was early in production, Fincher was ready to shut down, but the studio wanted to continue production and find a replacement. If the studio had shut down production permanently, it would have collected from insurance. If production was shut down then restarted, it would cost the studio , necessitating a quick replacement for Kidman. Rumored actors included Sandra Bullock, Angelina Jolie, and Robin Wright. Jodie Foster was previously occupied with directing duties of Flora Plum before its star Russell Crowe was injured and left the project, leading to that production's shutdown. To join Panic Room, Foster also stepped down as head of the awards jury at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. Foster had a week to prepare for her role before filming resumed.
Five weeks after Foster began filming Panic Room, she learned she was pregnant. She informed Fincher and his producer Chaffin of her pregnancy, and they decided to continue filming. Fincher did not want to rush production, so Foster changed her wardrobe from a tank top to a heavy sweater to disguise indications of her pregnancy. For action scenes, stunt double Jill Stokesberry replaced Foster.
In the film's progression, the house degrades in quality, so Fincher filmed scenes in continuity as the set changed. He also filmed many sequences twice due to their near-parallel appearance on the panic room's video monitors. Editor Wall said there were for the film with most set-ups having two cameras. One repeated take was when Raoul attempts to break into the panic room through the plaster ceiling below it. The plaster took 45 minutes to replace, so combined with repeated takes, a scene that was an eighth of a page in the script took two days to film. Another repeated take was one five-second shot being filmed over a hundred times: Meg being attacked by Raoul and dropping Sarah's medical kit. The shot was repeated so it would look like Meg did not toss the kit but instead lost it. Simultaneously, the kit needed to land in frame and in focus for the audience. Fincher argued for repeated takes so he could combine performances by the actors for "fluid" scenes. He also repeated takes with Stewart to ensure that her acting would be comparable to Foster's veteran performance.
The studio planned to release Panic Room in February 2002, but it determined that production could not be completed by then. Executives reviewed dailies of the film's opening scene and did not like Foster "hiding her stomach under a coat and purse". (Foster was also suffering from a sprained hip from distended ligaments due to her pregnancy.) The studio suspended production until after Foster's childbirth and rescheduled for the film to be released in March 2002. Foster gave birth in September 2001, and she returned to perform re-shoots, including the opening scene. She also returned two months later for additional filming, which concluded that November. Columbia Pictures screened the film for test audiences, who rated poorly the ending with the SWAT raid and Burnham's capture. By the screening, the set had been deconstructed due to storage costs, and Fincher estimated that it would cost to rebuild enough of the set to reshoot the ending. Instead, editors Haygood and Wall revisited Burnham's scenes and chose takes in which the character would appear less sympathetic. The final production budget for Panic Room was .
Nielsen draws parallels between the film's depiction of a dystopian urban space and director David Fincher's broader oeuvre, including Fight Club and Se7en. These works collectively explore themes of social and institutional decay. Panic Room critiques the commodification of fear and examines the intersections of gender, power, and security, especially through the character of Meg Altman (Jodie Foster). Foster's performance is seen as pivotal, blending her established on-screen persona of resilience and defiance with the film's commentary on societal reliance on patriarchal institutions. While the film questions the efficacy of both personal and systemic defenses, it reaffirms institutional authority, thereby reflecting the ambivalent politics of the era.
Kapur further contrasts Panic Room with earlier cinematic portrayals of women's paranoia, noting how the film adapts tropes from Gothic literature and 1940s "women's films" to reflect contemporary fears. While the protagonist demonstrates resourcefulness and agency in confronting external threats, her portrayal simultaneously underscores traditional gendered associations with emotional instability and domestic responsibility. According to Kapur, the film's emphasis on surveillance, technological dependency, and invasive danger encapsulates a pervasive cultural unease tied to the privatization of risk and the erosion of collective social safety nets.
Stahl further situates the home invasion scenario as a metaphor for patriarchal intrusion, with the panic room representing a space of autonomy reclaimed through tomboyish resilience. The narrative constructs Meg's transformation from a seemingly fragile mother into a decisive protector as one driven by her reconnection to a tomboyish past, inspired by Sarah's embodiment of defiant femininity. Through its metatextual engagement with Foster's career and its narrative elements, Panic Room challenges dominant cinematic conventions. The film resists the commodification of female vulnerability, opting instead to portray survival as an act of agency, reframing the interplay of gender and power in the thriller genre.
Kammerer highlights the film's unique cinematography, which eschews direct integration of CCTV imagery in favor of a "divine" omniscient camera. This approach allows the narrative to critique the panoptic nature of surveillance systems while maintaining the suspense of a closed environment. Ultimately, Meg's destruction of the surveillance cameras with a sledgehammer underscores the ambivalence of such technologies, aligning with David Lyon's framework of surveillance as having "two faces"—simultaneously protective and oppressive.
Ferguson notes that Panic Room employs Sarah's diabetes to explore the broader cinematic trope of "discipline and surveillance". The film's intricate exploration of technological surveillance, epitomized by the panic room's closed-circuit monitors, parallels Sarah's self-monitoring through her glucometer. This intertwining of technological transparency with Sarah's health condition not only underscores her vulnerability but also implicates viewers in the act of surveillance. Ferguson argues that this alignment positions diabetic self-care as a site of both personal discipline and external oversight, reflecting societal anxieties about control and dependence on technology.
Panic Room thus uses Sarah's diabetes not merely as a plot mechanism but as a metaphorical lens, examining the intersections of health, technology, and human fragility. Through its meticulous depiction of diabetic care and its integration into the narrative's central conflict, the film contributes to what Ferguson terms the "cinema of control", where illness becomes a tool for exploring themes of dependency and resilience.
The narrative explores how property and architecture reflect social hierarchies, positioning homeownership as a site of identity, security, and status. Siegel identifies the film's central tension as a critique of homeownership's mythos, presenting the house not as a sanctuary but as a site of entrapment and conflict. The analysis also underscores the racial implications of property ownership, as characters of color are either excluded from or sacrificed to maintain the sanctity of white domestic spaces. By intertwining race and real estate, Panic Room offers a symbolic critique of the economic and racial values underpinning American identity, emphasizing the exclusionary and hierarchical nature of the American dream.
The film's use of cinematic techniques and visual metaphors reinforces this dual commentary. Scenes depicting the panic room's surveillance system juxtaposed with the broader mansion highlight human reliance on mediated perceptions of space, akin to the Anthropocene's cognitive challenges of comprehending planetary scales. Furthermore, the protagonists' journey—from the isolated, hermetically sealed panic room to the public spaces of New York City—mirrors the oscillation between private and public ecologies. According to Ramuglia, this trajectory critiques Western domestic security's complicity in exacerbating ecological instability. The film's allegorical layering extends beyond the domestic sphere to address systemic inequalities, urban ecological dependencies, and the persistent illusions of self-sufficiency in a destabilized world.
King further situates Panic Room within the context of housing research, emphasizing how Fincher's treatment of space and technology critiques the limitations of Bachelard's optimistic framework. King's analysis juxtaposes the panic room's physical impenetrability with the psychological and emotional vulnerabilities it exposes. By framing the narrative as a battle for control over domestic space, the film reflects broader tensions in housing phenomena, where security measures can paradoxically generate new anxieties. King's work underscores the potential of film as a medium for interrogating the complexities of housing and its sociocultural implications.
Kitterman also connects the narrative to post-9/11 anxieties, drawing on the increased prominence of surveillance and the "bunker mentality" pervasive in early 21st-century America. The panic room itself becomes a metaphor for both physical and psychological entombment, revealing vulnerabilities rather than mitigating them. The film critiques the effectiveness of technological safeguards in a world fraught with uncertainties, much as Poe's stories question the limits of human control over mortality. Kitterman argues that Panic Room fails to provide true catharsis for these fears, offering instead a veneer of resolution that conceals deeper existential ambiguities.
Panic Room had its world premiere on , 2002 in Los Angeles. Fincher refused to edit the film to receive a PG-13 rating (parental guidance for children under 13) from the Motion Picture Association of America, so the MPAA gave the film an R rating (restricted to filmgoers at least 17 years old) for violence and language. It was commercially released in the United States and Canada on March 29, 2002. It was screened in and grossed on its opening weekend. It ranked first at the box office, and for both actor Jodie Foster and director David Fincher, the opening weekend gross was a personal best to date. It surpassed The Matrix (1999) to have the biggest Easter holiday-weekend opening and also had the third biggest opening to date for a non-supernatural thriller film, following Hannibal (2001) and Ransom (1996). Audiences polled by CinemaScore, during the opening-weekend, gave Panic Room a "B" grade on an A+ to F scale. The audience demographic was 53% female and 47% male, and 62% of audience members were aged 25 years and older.
In the film's second weekend (April 5–7) in the United States and Canada, it ranked first again with , competing mainly with the new release High Crimes. The film went on to gross at the US and Canadian box office and in other territories' box offices for a worldwide total of . (In 2006, the film had a re-release in Hong Kong that grossed , increasing the total to .) The film was Fincher's second highest-grossing to date after Se7en, which grossed worldwide. In the United States and Canada, Panic Room ranks fifth among David Fincher's films in box office gross. Adjusted for inflation, Panic Room ranks third. Worldwide, unadjusted for inflation, it ranks fifth.
Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal said, " Seven was stylishly gloomy, and Fight Club was smarmily pretentious, while Panic Room has been admirably stripped down to atmosphere as a function of architecture, and action as a consequence of character." Morgenstern commended the characters Meg and Sarah as feminist heroines and also called the home invaders "intriguing". He also applauded Foster's performance and the film's cinematography, and he said to Koepp's script as "all worked out too". Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four, describing Panic Room as close to "the ideal of a thriller existing entirely in a world of physical and psychological plausibility." Ebert wrote, "There are moments when I want to shout advice at the screen, but just as often the characters are ahead of me." Ebert also called Fincher "a visual virtuoso", and applauded Foster's performance as "spellbinding".
Columbia Pictures sold the television rights for Panic Room to Turner Broadcasting and CBS, who shared the rights over five years. In September 2004, Turner aired the film on channels TBS and TNT for 12 months, and afterward, CBS aired the film three times in an 18-month span. Turner resumed airing Panic Room for 30 months after CBS's turn.
In 2014, The A.V. Club listed Panic Room as one of 15 films which (at the time) notably lacked a Blu-ray release. A decade later, Fincher would go on to supervise a 4K remaster of the film, which Sony would ultimately release on Ultra HD Blu-ray on , 2025, in a special Steelbook edition also containing a standard Blu-ray disc and including the special features originally produced for DVD, marking its official debut on both formats.
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