Panic Room

Meg (Foster) is rich, recently divorced and rock-solid, save for occasional bouts of claustrophobia, and she's devoted to diabetic, but likewise feisty daughter Sarah (Stewart). You'd think they'd be safe in their huge new brownstone, especially as a former owner had installed a panic room: a well-hidden hi-tech priest's hole complete with a surveillance system covering the house. The very night Meg and Sarah move in, three burglars turn up expecting a clear run. Suddenly mother and daughter must fight for their lives. Never averse to glistening darkness, meaty metaphor or grandiloquent technical display, Fincher is also surprisingly at home with hokum. Less far-fetched than The Game, this is at once less imaginative and more routine. It's a tight, very efficient reworking of women-in-peril motifs, notably from Wait Until Dark, with a number of nods to Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder and Rear Window. Fincher handles the contours of the script as smoothly as the camera passes through plumbing and keyholes; while Jodie ably conveys the tight-lipped anxiety, resourcefulness and lithe strength familiar from her later roles.