Panic Room

So going into this movie, I thought it was going to be some horror movie or have something to do with some sort of psychopath killer (kinda like Zodiac), but I was pretty far off. It was a thriller, and a very good one at that. Fincher used a lot of cinematic techniques to add to the suspense of the thriller. He had a sort of recurring theme, a shot that he used several times throughout the movie that served to completely throw off the viewer. It was a shot that started off showing the character placed in the normal direction, then the camera does a 90 degree tilt, and the character is then shown in a completely different perspective that totally throws off the viewer, or at least I was totally messed up. After this move, something always happened. It was a giveaway, but nothing was really given away, just that something, anything was about to happen. The shot only shows the one character, so any of the other characters could do anything, which is exactly what happened. This is pretty much Fincher's way of doing the old Hitchcock showing the bomb under the table thing, except we don't know what the bomb is, just that there is a bomb-like thing somewhere that's about to go off. There was another really cool shot that was in a way the establishing shot. It was a really intense crane shot that evolved into a traveling shot that showed people outside the house trying to break in. It wasn't the first shot of the film, but it really showed the immensity of the house and what was really going to be occuring in the movie.

Fincher uses other aspects of film to add even more thrills and suspense. The characters that are found in the film each have some sort of quirk that you know will be very important at some point in the movie. Sarah has what seems to be diabetes, and being trapped in a room with no food of any kind will eventually lead to something bad happening - Meg, the mom played by Jodie Foster, has to eventually go and get Sarah's shots while there is a slight opening while the bad guys are having a fight about the money distribution. Burnham, one of the bad guys, refuses to kill anyone in the house. This ends up nearly killing him, and it is also what saves Meg in the end. He had intentions that were far better than any of the other bad guys in the movie; all he wanted to do was get the money to help his family and get out, no killing necessary. So the way the characters were set up was a key element that added to the suspense of the movie because you never knew when each character's quirk was going to cause a big change in the progression of the movie.

I think the best part of the movie was how well Fincher made the audience feel the emotions of each of the characters. You could truly see how desperate Meg was to save her daughter, and Burnham's humanity really came through his actions. It was something that I really enjoyed in the movie, feeling how the characters felt. Obviously it wasn't nearly as intense for me as the viewer, but even feeling just some of the intense emotions that the characters in the movie felt was enough to make me really really enjoy this movie. That is, if enjoying a thriller means being uptight and antsy and even a bit afraid the whole time.