The Grim Surveillance Aesthetics of 'Panic Room'

In David Fincher's fifth film, the camera is unsettlingly fluid and invasive.

Writing about the complicity and voyeurism of the audience may be an overused standard in film criticism, but nonetheless it is very eerie when, in Panic Room (2002), we follow the camera through absurd angles and movements across a New York townhouse as it is being invaded by thieves.

Jodie Foster plays Meg Altman, who moves with her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) into a massive new house post-divorce from her wealthy husband. When the house is broken into, Meg and Sarah flee into the panic room, a concept Fincher and writer David Koepp take several very redundant minutes to explain in the film’s introduction (it is the room around which the entire story revolves, but nothing in the introduction won’t be revealed in the course of time). Unfortunately for Meg and Sarah, the thieves want what’s in the panic room.

The entire film, save a couple of exterior shots bookending the film, is localized within Meg and Sarah’s new home. Wealthy fuck-up Junior (Jared Leto) wants to access a fortune left by his dead relative, the home’s previous owner, hoping to bypass the inheritance process and take more of it for himself. Because the money is hidden in a safe in the panic room, Junior has brought with him the security expert whose company installed the room: Burnham (Forest Whitaker). For some reason he has also brought Raoul (Dwight Yoakam), a mysterious armed man whose violent temper helps push the story forward. Like many great suspense films, the question is less what will happen than how the seemingly inevitable will play out.

As Meg and Sarah hide and the intruders attempt to flush them out, the audience is given a strangely omniscient view of the proceedings. Driven by eye-catching camera movements and fueled by the film’s elaborate, nearly film-length animated previsualization process, the camera of Panic Room is disturbingly free.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) is designed to feel like a single continuous shot, although the film is actually several shots seamed together. Beneath the viewer’s nose in a prominent chest is the body of of David, the man that Phillip (Farley Granger) and Brandon (John Dall) have just strangled as the film opens. The film plays out with David’s hidden body painfully near, generating a sense of complicity: we, the viewer, are in the shoes of Phillip and Brandon, knowing players rooted to the scene of their thrill-kill, waiting to escape or be caught by Rupert (James Stewart). Rope features a grounded cinematography rooted in the role of a party guest wandering the small apartment that contains the entire film.

Cut to 2002, when technological improvements and directorial discretion create a very different kind of voyeurism: the digital voyeur, not watching from inside but outside.

The 2023 film Missing (dir. Nicholas D. Johnson and Will Merrick) is another film that takes place entirely on a computer screen (like 2018’s Searching and 2014’s Unfriended), but what sets Missing apart is the Hitchcockian twist. When June (Storm Reid) suspects her mother Grace (Nia Long) is missing, the search takes her to every corner of her computer screen as she desperately uses modern tools to track the whereabouts of her mother. Eventually, the revelation that Grace has been kidnapped by her abusive ex-husband (June’s father) is compounded by a grim realization: we’ve been watching June’s screenon her father’s monitor as he high-tech stalks her.

In 2002, a movie like Missing could hardly have been made, but Panic Room predicts a kind of online voyeurism ruled by digitally stitched-together panoramas and the ability to move about in a virtual space at will. The camera in Panic Room moves like someone viewing an admittedly very technologically advanced 3D tour on Zillow. The camera is godlike and everywhere. It can move through any space, see through any barrier; the only thing it can’t do is intervene.

Missing features a show-within-the-film called Unfiction, a true-crime show that reflects the glut of such content on streaming services. Unfiction bookends Missing: first with an episode based on the events of Missing’s spiritual successor Searching, and ends with June and Grace’s story being put up on screen for voyeuristic pleasure.

While Panic Room is hardly a robust critique of techno-surveillance (if anything, the film seems to enjoy its detached omniscient point of view) or a Michael Haneke-like implication of the audience, the film presciently showcases the evolving ways society looks at one another.