The location, New York City, is established during the opening title sequence, where we
see huge text looming over skyscrapers in Manhattan, eventually zeroing in on Times
Square, the home of many world class Broadway shows.
These theatrical performances don’t have the luxury of jumping around from location
to location, and can oftentimes be set in a single place, relying entirely on strong
performances from each character to carry the show.
The same can be said of David Fincher’s 2002 film Panic Room.
Outside of a short intro and outro scene, the entirety of the movie takes place inside
this house, which fittingly, is a giant set where the script was shot in chronological
order.
“The nice thing about our movie was that we actually shot the entire film in sequence…
Everything happened exactly as it happens in the film, we got to shoot for beginning
to end.”
If these shots are a hint to the audience to buckle in for a Broadway-like horror-suspense-thriller,
the electronic billboard gives us a clue as to what the main character is going to go
through.
It flashes out a message: face your fears -- something that our claustrophobic hero,
Meg Altman will have to come to terms with after she and her daughter are forced to take
cover in the tiny confines of the Panic Room.
“Open it please.”
“All the kids he’s apparently got, no wonder he wanted a place to hide.”
“Please open the door.”
“That is highly inappropriate.”
“Open the door.
Please.”
But the fear of small spaces wouldn’t be the only obstacle that Meg would have to overcome.
To learn the connection to David Fincher’s sophomore film Se-seven-en and the truth about
how Ms. Altman alerted the police without her daughter’s captors finding out, stick
around to the end of this video.
Welcome to Things You Missed.
In today’s episode I’ll be covering the apparently under-appreciated Panic Room.
The only thing I don’t really get about panic rooms, is why they are called panic
rooms.
I mean they are supposed to be the safest place in the house, right?
So they should really call them “don’t panic rooms.”
Or “the stay calm room.”
“STAY ****ing CALM!”
NOBODY PANIC!
I’m gonna roll the logo….
Early on in the film, we are given a tour of the property.
“Stop calling it ‘the property.’ It sounds ridiculous.”
Actually, what may look like a tour of the…
house… is really
setting up the backstory of this movie.
We are given snippets of information about the previous owner, Sidney Pearlstien.
One line in particular tells us most of what we need to know.
“His kids are suing each other over the estate.
He was a recluse.
Rich.
Paranoid.
Now it turns out they can’t find half his money.”
We later find out that one of those kids is the burglar, Junior.
Also known as Cornrow Leto.
Another important detail explains why Meg is uncomfortable with tight spaces.
“This whole thing makes me nervous.”
“Why?”
“Ever read any Poe?”
“No, but I loved her last album.”
Update in 2020.
Haunted is STILL her last album.
But Meg wasn’t talking about the singer Poe, she was referencing our boy Edgar Allen.
More specifically, she’s probably talking about his short horror story, The Premature
Burial, which is about a man with catalepsy, a condition that can cause you to fall into
a trance where you lose your consciousness and your body goes rigid, giving the appearance
of a corpse.
Because of this, the man becomes paranoid of being buried alive.
His fear stems from claustrophobia, which is exactly what makes Meg uncomfortable about
the panic room.
When the two Altman girls are trapped in the room later, the daughter Sarah tries to calm
her by saying that people never get buried alive anymore.
“I guess it used to happen all the time.”
Sarah has a condition of her own, which is also set up in the early going, when we see
her medication in fridge, her Mom limiting how much soda is poured in her glass, and
the blood-sugar monitor watch that she wears to bed,
The camerawork in this movie is nothing short of ridiculous.
It not only does a great job of establishing the layout of the house and showing us just
how close Meg and Sarah are to the intruders when they break in, but it also has this perfect,
machine-like flow that represents the burglars’ methodical approach to breaking and entering.
We also see the camera passing through objects and passing through walls, but for
the burglars, passing through solid matter is the one thing they’d like to do that
they can't.
In my episode of Things You Missed episode on Se7en, I explained how the main conflict in the movie
is a lot like a chess match, and according to cinematographer Conrad Hall, a similar
analogy exists in Panic Room.
“This was always I think for him, a chess game, and he wanted the audience to be completely
involved in seeing everything and knowing everything, in many cases before the characters
know them in the movie.
The audience knows exactly where everybody is in the chess game in that moment.”
In addition to the camerawork, the film editing is also used in very creative ways.
I love this part where cutting away is used to censor profanity.
“She’s lying.”
“You’re full of sh--”
And when Meg eventually taps into the phone line to try to call for help, the movie is
cut so that we only hear what her ex-husband Stephen hears.
"There are three men--
--stairs, they broke into the--"
Stephen’s new girlfriend, who is the first to pick up the phone when Meg calls, is voiced
by actress Nicole Kidman, who was previously cast to play Meg, but had to drop out due
to a knee injury.
They actually shot for three weeks with Nicole before Jodie Foster had to be brought in to
replace her.
So Jodie replaced Nicole in the movie, but Nicole replaced Jodie in the marriage (in
the movie).
But there would be another interesting cameo in Panic Room, when we’re introduced to
the neighbor across the way who is the key to finding even more Things You Missed.
In a moment of desperation, Sarah eventually discovers a ventilation hole to the outside, and uses
a flashlight to try to send a message to their neighbor.
The neighbor, who is credited as “Sleepy Neighbor” is played by Andrew Kevin Walker,
who was the screenwriter of Se7en.
That means the three central characters of Se7en, Detective Somerset, Detective Mills
and John Doe are his creations.
I think these three all have spiritual successors in Panic Room.
Forest Whitaker plays Burnham, a smart calm, logical voice of reason.
He’s only in on the heist because he wants a better life for his kid, similar to how
Detective Somerset may have used illegal tactics to help locate John Doe, but it came from
a good place, because he was fighting for a better world.
Cornrow Leto plays Junior, the young, inexperienced Burglar with a short temper, who gets in way
over his head.
He brought Burnham and Raoul together for the heist, so he’s technically in charge,
but like Detective Mills in Se7en, he doesn’t quite know what he’s gotten himself into
and defaults to the others for help.
Then there’s Dwight Yoakam as Raoul.
He’s the crazy one, but he rarely loses his temper.
He’s always cool and calculating, even as he negotiates a higher cut of the money they’re
planning to steal.
His entire personality and demeanor is very similar to John Doe.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Raoul.”
"Doesn't matter who I am. Who I am means absolutely nothing."
So here are my spiritual succession characters, but I should also note that you COULD make
a case for switching Junior and Raoul, because (and this is a spoiler alert for Se7en, so
skip ahead if you haven’t seen it) Raoul is the one who takes out Junior, similar to
what Mills eventually does to John Doe, and Raoul’s left hand is injured when he accidentally
pinches it in the panic room door, just as Mills hurts his hand in the chase with John
Doe.
So in that case you could say that Junior is John Doe because it was all his plan to
bring everyone together like John brought everyone together at the end of Se7en, and
Raoul is Mills because he lets his rage get the better of him and he beats up Stephen,
who shows up to try to save the girls.
And it’s also possible none of this was intentional at all, but there’s no doubt that David
Fincher’s directorial trademarks are responsible for some similarities between these films,
like the fact that it’s raining for the majority of both movies.
But he wasn’t the only one to leave his mark on this film.
That’s right, I’m talking about SONY.
Let’s go back to the VERY beginning.
Columbia Pictures.
A SONY Pictures Entertainment Company.
In the panic room.
SONY monitors.
Next to the monitors.
A SONY telephone.
The entire house.
Covered by SONY cameras.
I’m just surprised they didn’t give Sarah a pair of Spyro pajamas and have her recite
Michael Jackson albums when she gets nervous, the product placement in this movie is just...
out of control.
What?
The big question that always comes up when you talk about Panic Room is the ending.
Burnham goes back to save the family from Raoul and the police show up to arrest him
before he can get away.
As he puts his hands up, $22M swirls away and is lost in the wind.
But the question everyone seems to ask, is how the police knew to come back after this
scene, which took place earlier that night when the cops showed up after receiving calls
from Meg, Stephen and a neighbor.
Raoul and Burnham are with Sarah in the panic room, and they make it clear that something
bad will happen to her if she tries anything suspicious with the cops.
She lets them know she’s gonna try to send them away in exchange for her daughter’s
safety right here.
She also knows that the thieves are watching her every move on the video cameras.
The cameras aren’t equipped with audio, but she also knows there are two of them in
there, so one of them could sneak down to listen in on the conversation.
So as far as we can tell during that scene, she sends the cops away without raising the
alarm, and Burnham and Raoul still think they have a chance to get away with it.
However, if we take a closer look at the scene, we can see Meg is very deliberate about this
interaction with the police.
Earlier on, when she was able to temporarily hook up the phone line, she made two calls.
The first was to the police, who put her on hold, so she promptly hangs up and makes the
second call to her ex-husband.
Remember, she was in the panic room when she made these calls, so the bad guys didn’t
hear either of them, and she’s able to use that to her advantage by giving subtle clues
to the cops that something doesn’t add up.
Roll it.
“We got a call ma’am.”
“Somebody called you?”
This is the first sign that something is up.
She was the first one to make a call, and now she’s acting like it never happened.
Then look at this next part.
“Can we come in?”
“What do you want?”
“We’d like to come in.”
“No, you can’t come in.”
Pause it right there.
As she steps back she leans against the second door, opening it ever so slightly so that
the cop can see the couch pushed up against the door, and possibly the man bleeding out
in the living room.
Then she turns away to close the inner door, calling even more attention to it.
But perhaps the most important part of the conversation is this.
“There were three.”
“What?”
“Your husband said you called for help, and you said, there were three right before
you got cut off?
What was the end of that sentence?”
So Meg makes up a story about how she drunkenly called her ex-husband and said there are three
things that she would do if he drove over and hopped in bed with her right now, but
she came to her senses and hung up mid-sentence.
But if we go back even earlier in the night to examine that phone call, she says,
“Stephen, you gotta help us.
There are three men…”
So this is the perfect lie to tell them, because she knows it’s wrong, the cops know it’s
wrong, and the robbers know it’s wrong, but robbers don’t know that the cops know
it’s wrong.
They think she’s making up a good excuse.
And then there’s one final test.
“Ma’am.
If there’s something you want to say to us, but maybe you can’t say it right now.
You might want to make some kind of a signal.
Like blinking your eyes a few times.
Something like that.”
And we never see Meg blink her eyes, but the scene cuts back to the close-up of the officer,
so it’s left unknown for the rest of the movie if she blinked at him while she was
off-screen.
But after seeing the ending, I think she did give a signal, and the cop was smart enough
to put all those pieces together and know that it wasn’t the right time for them to
storm into the house.
But perhaps an even bigger mystery is why there isn’t a Blu-Ray available for this
movie.
I mean Sony has already demonstrated that they want to promote the heck out of themselves
by drenching this movie in product placement, so it seems like a no brainer to put this
beloved film on Blu-Ray, it’ll probably have ads for Sony movies inside the box, trailers
-- it’s a win-win for everyone.
So you know what, internet, let’s make this happen already.
I’m gonna put a link in the description, let’s get this thing going.
And hey, if you love horror, you don’t need to panic, because you’re in the right place.
I’m gonna be covering all of David Fincher’s horror-thriller type movies, most of them
are probably more thriller-mystery but that’s OK, if there’s suspense or creepiness, like
in this case Jared Leto’s haircut, I’m game to cover it, and you’ll find it in
that playlist on the left.
Remember to subscribe to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, ring that deathbell for
notifications and I’ll see you in the next one, assuming we stay inside.
Of the panic room.