Panic Room: Steelbook (4K UHD Review)

• Reviewed by: Stephen Bjork
• Review Date: Feb 24, 2025
• Format: 4K Ultra HD
• 

Director

David Fincher

Release Date(s)

2002 (February 18, 2025)

Studio(s)

Columbia Pictures/Hofflund/Polone/Indelible Pictures (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment)

• Film/Program Grade: A-
• Video Grade: A-
• Audio Grade: A
• Extras Grade: A+

Review

There’s a single shot in David Fincher’s Panic Room that defines the film as a whole. It’s the moment when Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) has just gone to bed in her new four-story brownstone on the Upper West Side of New York City, and the home invaders who are about to turn her life inside out end up making their first appearance. The camera pulls back from Meg’s bed and then backs through the railings of the banister; continues down the stairs to the window where we see the thieves arrive; pans over to the door where it pushes into the keyhole and then pulls back out again; turns around and goes through the dining room and kitchen, moving through the handle of a coffeepot while going over chairs and under cabinets before meeting the thieves at the back doors; moves up through the ceiling as they climb the stairs outside to an upper level door; passes through the ceiling again as they climb a ladder to the roof; pans by Meg once more before pulling back again and going up the staircase this time; tilts up to show the thieves trying to enter the cupola on the roof; then pulls back down and pushes through the barely open door of the closet before finally showing them successfully breaking into a hatch on the ceiling. Then, and only then, do editors James Haygood and Angus Wall cut away to another shot.

It’s a single continuous shot displaying virtuoso camerawork, and yet there’s just one problem: as the above description should make perfectly clear, the camera is doing one impossible thing after another, providing a unity of time and space while violating the laws of physics at the same time. It establishes the geography of the brownstone and familiarizes viewers with how every room is oriented in relationship to the rest of the home, which will prove crucial to understanding the action that occurs later. Yet it’s tearing that home apart in order to let the camera do things that a real, purely physical camera simply can’t do in a contiguous setting like this. Five years earlier, Fincher had directed a film called The Game that played elaborate games with viewer identification and orientation, and yet in Panic Room, he gave the whole game away in just one shot. In this single shot in a single film, Fincher pulled off something that Alfred Hitchcock only dreamed of doing throughout a career that spanned more than a half century. It could only happen thanks to the advent of digital visual effects, and yet aside from the shots moving through the ceiling, most viewers probably aren’t even aware of all the computer-generated trickery. It’s the textbook definition of a virtuoso moment, and yet like most such things, making it happen wasn’t easy, as Fincher explained to American Cinematographer in 2002:

“I thought it would be a fun movie to make, and I was wrong. Panic Room was a bit of a Rubik’s Cube. I never would have thought it would end up being as complicated (to make) as it was. It’s supposed to be a popcorn movie—there are no great, overriding implications, it’s just about survival. Unlike The Game, where we had a very difficult story that we tried to tell in a simple fashion, Panic Room was a very simple story that we tried to tell in the most difficult fashion.”

Those difficulties began right from conception, with Fincher using Pixel Liberation Front to create digital previz storyboards in order to help bring David Koepp’s script to life as a guide for the production, but that process ended up evolving constantly. Part of that was due to external factors, like the fact that Nicole Kidman was originally hired as Meg but had to drop out due to injuries that she suffered making Moulin Rouge, and the height differential between her and Foster ended up requiring some unexpected adjustments during filming (to say nothing of the fact that Foster demanded rewrites in order to make her character less passive). Fincher and his Se7en cinematographer Darius Khondji didn’t see eye-to-eye this time around, so he was replaced by Conrad Hall midway through production. Even the original choice for Meg’s daughter Sarah, Hayden Panettiere, ended up being changed to Kristen Stewart instead. Fincher blamed himself and his own indeterminate vision for many of these production issues, telling American Cinematographer that “a number of the film’s problems were created by my inability to allow the film to grow in the ways that it wanted to. I had such a clear idea of what the film would be, but ultimately it’s nothing like what I thought it would be.”

And yet when all was said and done, Panic Room ended up being exactly what he wanted it to be once he had finally made up his mind (and that’s true regardless of the fact that he’s prone to rethinking his older films these days). Fincher wanted to step back from the intricate complexities of The Game and Fight Club to make a simple, straightforward B-movie thriller, but it ended up being anything but straightforward due to his obsessive need to exercise control over every facet of the film’s production. Koepp’s screenplay provided the template that he needed, with Meg and Sarah trapped inside the panic room in their new home while they fight off a bumbling group of home invaders including Burnham (Forest Whitaker), Raoul (Dwight Yoakam), and Junior (Jared Leto). It’s a relatively uncomplicated cat-and-mouse game in a “bottle episode” setting, but a battle of wits where not all of the participants have that many of them to begin with. Yet they still have a few aces up their sleeves, so there are a couple of unexpected reversals of fortune along the way.

Still, the real twist in Panic Room has nothing to do with the narrative. Instead, it’s Fincher’s conceit of providing a seamlessly omniscient perspective for viewers of the film. It’s similar to the kind of thing that Hitchcock had done with Rear Window, but this time in reverse. Instead of the camera being restricted to Jeff’s perspective while he’s confined in his apartment and surveying his surroundings, Fincher’s camera is completely unmoored from Meg and Sarah’s confined setting, viewing their travails from anywhere and everywhere in the surrounding environment. Thanks to the way that the “big shot” defines this environment near the beginning of the film, viewers are frequently in the position to understand what’s happening (or what’s going to happen) long before the characters realize it. B-movie storyline or not, that fundamentally altered the nature of the suspense that Panic Room offers. The framework was there in Koepp’s script, but Fincher took the concept to the next level. That’s been a common thread throughout his career: pushing technological boundaries in order to serve the needs of the stories that he’s telling, taking everything to the next level. That’s why more than two decades after it was originally released, Panic Room is still next-level filmmaking.

Cinematographers Conrad Hall and Darius Khondji shot Panic Room on 35mm film (in Super-35 format) using 3-perf Panavision Platinum cameras with Classic Primo spherical lenses, framed at 2.39:1 for its theatrical release. Always at the advent of new technologies, Fincher opted to complete the film in the digital realm as a 2K Digital Intermediate, and like many such early 2K DIs, it had baked-in artifacts and other issues that created some challenges in bringing the film to life in 4K. Fortunately, instead of simply upscaling the existing DI with all of the flaws intact, Sony sprang for doing a rebuild by scanning the original camera negative at 4K resolution wherever possible, and upscaling the 2K DI instead as necessary for all of the titles and visual effects shots. New High Dynamic Range grades were created for both Dolby Vision and HDR10. Since Fincher was involved every step of the way, many new changes and tweaks were made during this process, but more on that in a moment.

The iconic opening title sequence for Panic Room was created in 2K with 8-bit computer generated imagery, and while it appears to have been sharpened a bit for this version, it still looks soft and lacking in fine detail. That situation improves substantially once the credits are over, but keep in mind that there are myriad effects shots throughout the rest of the film that display the same weaknesses. They’re just a bit less noticeable under the low-light conditions inside the brownstone than they are under the bright sunlight of the daytime exteriors. Yet it’s not much different than older films where the visual effects, titles, and transitions were composited via an optical printer, with all of the generational loss that the process entailed. Those shots have always stood out, and they still stand out in this case.

The rest of the film looks great, with vastly improved fine detail compared to the old Superbit DVD—frankly, it’s no comparison at all. The grain does vary slightly in the effects shots, not from generational loss as much from the inadequacy of the technology used to create the 2K DI. The grain in the rest of the film is very fine but it’s still present. Panic Room was never a particularly grainy film to begin with—Khondji and Hall used Kodak 320T 5277 for its tight grain structure and relatively low contrast, which combined with underexposed toplighting, gave Fincher the “underlit” look that he wanted for all of the interiors. The intention was always to fix it digitally in post, and that’s how the whole shoot was planned. The contrast was always adjusted compared to what was filmed on set, and it’s further enhanced here. Despite being a dimly-lit film, the contrast range has been greatly enhanced via HDR, with much more depth and detail on display in the darkest corners of the frame. Even the different shades of black are more clearly delineated. The color balance has also been improved compared to the DVD, with the green push on that old master dialed down here, and everything looking a bit more natural. (It’s a rare case where green has been subtracted from a new master, not added to it.)

Now, regarding the digital changes that Fincher has introduced for this new 4K master: they’re abundant but largely seamless. These include altered background textures like cement blocks, wallpaper, and paint; added and subtracted architectural and construction details; added anamorphic lens flares (in a film shot with spherical lenses!); straightened out fisheye distortion from some of the wide-angle lenses; and adjusted framing. Most of those are things that no one would ever notice without comparing them side-by-side with the DVD, but there are a couple of other changes that do stand out a bit more. A few of the close-ups have been digitally punched up with enhanced detail, which may bother some people, but more problematically, there are now enhanced laser beams for the electric eyes on the panic room door. (While these green beams were already faintly visible depending on the camera angle, they’re bordering on looking like light sabers now.) Yet these changes aren’t responsible for the overall look of this new 4K master.

Panic Room may have been shot on film, but it was completed digitally in 2K with 8-bit visual effects, and it’s always had a digital appearance. Even back in 2002, Fincher was already making digital fixes, like when he was dissatisfied by how the gun and cell phones looked when they were sliding toward the camera so he replaced them with digital ones. Most of the elaborate tracking shots are filled with relatively low-res computer-generated imagery—in the “big shot” that defines the whole film, don’t freeze frame on the coffeepot, the chairs, the moving boxes, or anything else if you don’t want to spoil the illusion. The reality is that standard-definition DVD has covered over a multitude of sins for more than two decades now, and HD and Ultra HD were always going to expose the occasionally harsh digital reality. Even if this UHD was based on a simple upscale of the original 2K DI, it still would have had a slightly processed, digital appearance to it. The only thing that might have helped would have been to do a 4K scan of a 35mm theatrical print instead, but that would have introduced problems of its own.

If you were hoping that Panic Room was going to have a natural, filmic look on UHD, then you were fooling yourself. It’s fair to have issues with all of the new tweaks that Fincher has made this time around, but those tweaks aren’t what created the digital look in the first place. It’s just that compared to DVD, the veil has now been lifted. It’s fine to reject this 4K master on principle because you object to all the new changes, but don’t do so based on unrealistic expectations that don’t reflect the reality of how Panic Room was created. As always, it’s your choice, but it would be a shame to throw out this rather beautiful baby with its admittedly controversial bathwater.

Primary audio is offered in English Dolby Atmos and 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio. Panic Room was released theatrically in 5.1, but as with most other Sony Atmos remixes, it would be a mistake not to at least audition this one first. As usual for Sony, it doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but rather simply enhances the spatiality and immersiveness. The subtle ambient sounds of the brownstone have been spread further throughout the soundstage, and directional effects move with more precision—when the improvised propane line breaks, it whips around the viewer and feels like it’s in the room with you. While there may be some added or altered sound effects, they blend in naturally enough with the original effects. Even more importantly, Howard Shore’s marvelous score sounds simply superb in Atmos. Given the no less fruitful partnership that Fincher would end up forming with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, it’s easy to forget just how important that Shore was to the director’s earlier work.

Additional audio options include French, German, Italian, and Spanish (Spain) 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, plus Spanish (Latin America) and Thai 5.1 Dolby Digital. Subtitle options include English, English SDH, Arabic, Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Latin America), Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Sony’s 4K Ultra HD Steelbook release of Panic Room is a three-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film as well as a second Blu-ray with additional extras. There’s also a Digital Code on a paper insert tucked inside—hey, it may have taken decades for this particular film to escape standard definition, but at least it’s not Warner Bros., so all the old amenities are still included. Well, aside from readability, anyway: the layered iridescent printing on each disc makes it really difficult to tell which one is which. There are no extras on the UHD, but the following extras are included on the Blu-rays only (note that while they’re all encoded in HD, only the Theatrical Trailer is full HD—the rest are upscaled from SD):

DISC TWO: FEATURE FILM

• Cast Commentary
• Director’s Commentary
• Writer’s Commentary
• Pre-production:
  • Prep:
    • The Testing Phase (16:33)
    • Safe Cracking School (12:54)
  • Previsualization:
    • Creating the Previs (10:23)
    • Previs Demo (3:34)
    • Previs Demo with Commentary (3:34)
    • Habitrail Film (1:04)
    • Multi-Angle Featurette (38:30)
  • Production:
    • Shooting Panic Room (52:37)
    • Make Up Effects (8:57)
• Easter Eggs:
  • Real Safe Rooms (6:18)
  • Breaking the Mirror (2:17)

The extras are all ported over from the 2004 Special Edition DVD release of Panic Room. Produced by the inimitable David Prior, they kick off with three different commentary tracks. The Cast Commentary is a curated track featuring Jodie Foster, Forest Whitaker, and Dwight Yoakam, all of whom were recorded separately and edited together. It’s an interesting collection of their various memories about making the film. The Writer’s Commentary is a group track featuring David Koepp along with the legendary William Goldman, who acts as a sort of a moderator (although in practice it’s really more of an interview). Koepp hardly needed the prodding, but he and Goldman interacted well in deconstructing the story and how it evolved into the finished film—and it sounds like Goldman did his homework, too. Last and definitely not least, the Director’s Commentary features David Fincher going solo to discuss his own perspectives. He openly acknowledges that Panic Room is a dressed-up B-movie, and provides a ton of detail about the technical challenges in making the film. He also acknowledges the revolving door with the cast and crew, and even promises that he’ll make it up to Darius Khondji someday (something that hasn’t actually happened to date). All three tracks are worth a listen, but Fincher aficionados will know where to start.

The rest of the extras are organized with Prior’s usual precision, divided into pre-production, production, and post-production. Pre-production kicks off with two featurettes showing off early prep work. The Testing Phase features Conrad Hall showing off some of the early lighting and exposure tests—if you’re wondering just how far he went with underexposing the Kodak stock that he used, this offers some striking examples. Safe Cracking School is raw footage of a technical advisor demonstrating the techniques that Forest Whitaker ended up using in the final film.

The rest of pre-production is devoted to the previsualization process. It starts with Creating the Previs, which shows Fincher working with PLF on designing some of the shots, accompanied by explanatory text. The Previs Demo offers the “big shot” of the film in split-screen comparing the previs design and the previs shooting breakdown to the final shot from the film, with or without optional commentary by unidentified participants. The Habitrail Film is a cutaway view of the brownstone that was used to help clarify the action for a chase scene. The Multi-Angle Featurette offers a comparison between the various levels of the previs process to how they appeared in the final film, with two different angles and four different audio options each. Angle 1 compares the physical storyboards to the rough cut of the dailies, while Angle 2 compares the previs to the final cut. Both of them can be played with raw on-set audio, commentary by storyboard artist Peter Ramsey, the final mix, and commentary by PLF founder Colin Green. (For those keeping track at home, that’s a whopping 5+ hours to get through everything.)

The production phase kicks off with Shooting Panic Room, which offers a ton of behind-the-scenes footage, including material from the set and the brief location shoots, as well as interviews with production designer Arthur Max, Conrad Hall, special effects coordinator Joe Viskocil, Jodie Foster, Dwight Yoakam, Forest Whitaker, and Jared Leto. (Darius Khondji appears via some of the behind-the-scenes footage, but needless to say he isn’t interviewed.) The Make Up Effects featurette has Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr. describing the work that they did on the film and showing off a few of the prosthetics. (Goro is prominently visible behind them, which is always a plus.) Finally, two of the Easter eggs from the DVD are offered here: Real Safe Rooms with Gavin de Becker and Breaking the Mirror with Joe Viskocil.

DISC THREE: EXTRAS

• Visual Effects:
  • Introduction (1:29)
  • Main Titles (11:04)
  • Through Bedroom Door (1:11)
  • The Skylight (1:34)
  • The Big Shot (20:22)
  • Through the Railing (1:56)
  • Giant Dust (1:44)
  • Through the Wall and Floor (2:57)
  • The Hose (5:59)
  • Propane Gas (1:33)
  • The Explosion (3:51)
  • The Flashlight (5:37)
  • Slow Motion (3:45)
  • X-Ray Floor (3:20)
  • Safe Shavings/Digital Squibs (:55)
  • CGI Gun and Cell Phone (2:23)
  • Arm on Fire (1:53)
  • CGI Propane Tank (3:10)
  • Headwounds (2:04)
  • Fluttering Bonds and CGI Leaves (4:27)
  • CGI Fire (1:51)
• Scoring:
  • Main Titles (2:15)
  • Sealing the House (2:57)
  • The Phone Call (3:37)
  • Altman (4:24)
• On Sound Design (15:16)
• Digital Intermediate (10:44)
• Super-35 Technical Explanation (32 pages in all)
• Sequence Breakdowns:
  • The Phone Jack:
    • Script (2:06)
    • Storyboards (1:18)
    • B-Roll (5:34)
    • Dailies (13:49)
    • Tests (:35)
  • End of Junior:
    • Script (2:06)
    • Storyboards (1:10)
    • B-Roll (5:39)
    • Dailies (5:24)
    • Tests (3:32)
  • Hammer Time:
    • Script (1:26)
    • Storyboards (1:50)
    • B-Roll (4:12)
    • Dailies (4:52)
    • Tests (5:35)
  • Burnham Surrounded:
    • Script (1:26)
    • Storyboards (1:34)
    • B-Roll (5:18)
    • Dailies (4:01)
    • Tests (1:41)
• Teaser Trailer (1:55)
• Theatrical Trailer (2:26)
• DVD Credits (3:28)

Disc two is devoted to the post-production process, starting with the Visual Effects. After a brief introduction from visual effects supervisor Kevin Tod Haug, each section steps through the major effects sequences in the film and a variety of different effects elements that were used in other shots. Obviously, the centerpiece is The Big Shot, but the rest provide proof of just how much that David Fincher was already prone to digital replacements even as far back as 2002—and we’re not just talking about the aforementioned gun and cell phone, either. (Note that there’s a handy Play All option if you want to digest the whole thing in an 82-minute sitting.)

The Scoring section features Howard Shore conducting four different cues from his score. Each of them offers different angles on the orchestra as well as composite footage comparing the scoring sessions to the final sequences in the film. On Sound Design is a conversation between sound designer Ren Klyce and David Prior. It covers his history with Fincher and his work on Panic Room, with Klyce providing examples of how he put some of the sounds together.

Digital Intermediate has post-production supervisor Peter Mavromates explaining the then-new DI process, showing the raw dailies and demonstrating how they were color corrected digitally. Conrad Hall is also on hand to explain how the shoot was planned with that process in mind. Super-35 Technical Explanation is a series of text pages and still photo examples of how the Super-35 format works compared to other formats, written (with an occasional bit of snark) by Prior. Finally, the Sequence Breakdowns offer a comprehensive overview of four different scenes from the film, with four different options each: Script, Storyboards, B-Roll, Dailies, and Tests. They include behind-the-scenes footage, raw dailies, camera and lighting tests, and more. (Oh, and don’t skip the Teaser Trailer, which is narrated by Linda Hunt.)

As far as I can tell, that’s absolutely everything from the DVD, right down to the DVD Credits. There was a third Easter egg in the Visual Effects section, CGI Fire, but that’s just been moved to the main features here instead. There aren’t any missing extras from other releases of Panic Room because there haven’t been any, at least not legitimately. And there’s no need for more extras anyway, since this is an excellent example of the kind of “film school in a box” packages from the classic LaserDisc and DVD era. It’s a lost era, too, so it’s wonderful that everything has been preserved here. If you’re not entirely happy about all of the tweaks that Fincher has made in this new 4K master, you may want to hang onto your old DVD for that reason alone, but otherwise it can safely move on to greener pastures. And if you’re completely unhappy with the changes, then move on folks, nothing to see here. Otherwise, this is pretty much a mandatory upgrade. It’s a rare example of a major film leaping straight from DVD to UHD with no steps in between, and it’s not likely to disappoint anyone who can view it with an open mind. Highly recommended.

-Stephen Bjork

(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).