The panic room makes its ominous appearance on-screen in the very first sequence of the film, as recent divorcée Meg (Jodie Foster) and her daughter Sara (Kristen Stewart) tour the house with real-estate agents (Ian Buchanan and a delightfully severe Ann Magnuson). Sara decides the panic room, with its bank of surveillance video monitors and complement of survival supplies, is way cool; Meg decides she'll take the place. High-concept thrillers being what they are, it's on their first night in the new digs that a trio of burglars quietly force their way inside.

Like many elements of David Koepp's screenplay, this development could smack of contrivance if not for Fincher's riveting directorial style. The first intruder is named Burnham, played by the imposing Forest Whitaker. It's his job to case the place before letting his accomplices in, and the camera stares directly into his eyes as he looks in on Meg, sleepless in bed and facing away from him. These moments are tense in part because we're not sure what we're reading in Whitaker's gaze. As it turns out, it's surprise and concern. Meg has moved in a week too early. Burnham's criminal colleagues, the perpetually irritated Junior (bitchy Jared Leto) and the implacable pro called Raoul (a ski-masked Dwight Yoakam), decide to go ahead with their plan anyway, over Burnham's objections. They mean to round up mother and daughter and then go to work, but Meg foils those plans when she grabs Sara and takes refuge inside the panic room itself.

With that, Fincher is off and running. The men won't leave the house, because what they want is actually inside the panic room. Much bickering ensues as they try to figure out a way to get in, or to force Meg and Sara out. Fincher depicts the struggle with every stops-out, widescreen, Dolby Digital tool available to him, offering his usual master course in the mechanics of cinema. Working with repeat collaborators including the terrific film editor James Haygood, production designer Arthur Max, and sound designer Ren Klyce, Fincher builds a self-contained, claustrophobia-inducing thrill machine. (Curiously, Darius Khondji, with whom Fincher worked so successfully on Se7en, was dumped partway through the shoot and replaced with Conrad W. Hall, son of Conrad L. Hall.)

Occasionally, Fincher's techno-fetishism threatens to completely hijack what is, really, an old-school thriller. When he sends the camera tracking pointlessly through the apartment, squeezing itself impossibly between the bars of a stairway's railing or through the handle of a coffee pot, Fincher exhibits the worst tendencies of that show-off Robert Zemeckis. Moreover, the entire movie bears the sickly patina common to films with copious amounts of CGI work from The Matrix forward, as if the film's grain and color palette had been better optimized to blend with the digital effects. My gripe with this aesthetic is a personal and maybe a superficial one; it does work for a film that takes place at night in New York City, and certainly Fincher got precisely the images he wanted in terms of light and shadow. (The grainless DVD version is bound to look sharper.)

The real question is whether there was a need to rely so heavily on the unreal computer enhancements that allow Fincher to track his virtual camera in ways that couldn't be duplicated physically. Despite a couple of ill-advised, undeniably phony-looking images, it's good stuff. When the camera actually dollies into a keyhole as the burglars rattle the doors, the moment is preternaturally chilling, violating the fragile security of a door lock with the invasive, all-seeing nature of Fincher's camera eye. To pull this off, Fincher ordered the creation of a computer model of his four-story soundstage set, which was used to create digital storyboards through which the camera and computer-generated versions of the characters could move. That allowed him to carefully plan each tracking shot and to precisely time concurrent events in different locations within the house. The on-screen results-including one amazing slow-motion sequence with lots of goosebump-inducing cross-cutting that plays out wordlessly and nearly soundlessly-are real white-knuckle stuff.

Because the movie is all about intrusion and violation, Fincher's utter appropriation and manipulation of real space feels appropriate on some metatextual level. Further, it's the unprecedented omniscience, and perhaps the presumed sadism, of this particular filmmaker that lends Panic Room much of its menace-the man who put Gwyneth Paltrow's head in a box may just be willing to do something terrible to Jodie Foster's daughter. Panic Room is quite a bit more friendly than that, but when Finch started breaking bones in the third act, it still made me squirm. What's missing is subtext, I suppose. Though the film allows lots of issues to percolate just below the surface-race, class and gender are the clear dividers between the terrorists and the terrorized here-it stops well short of making explicit reference to them. And Koepp's screenplay is defined, more or less, by its superficiality. Rather than digging around into the psychologies of its characters, it concerns itself entirely with what the next strategic move will be in an extended battle of wits.

And that's the bottom line. I've read a lot of kvetching-starting with the derisive "script reviews" that showed up at Aint-it-cool-news.com two years ago-about various implausibilities in the screenplay. And while it would be a stretch to call Panic Room entirely credible, you could say the same thing about Vertigo, for instance. Panic Room is clearly no Vertigo, but what Fincher has in common with Hitchcock and other great genre directors is a sense of style and purposefulness that renders objections to some of the film's convolutions more or less moot, at least for the time it takes all of the reels to unspool.