Known for his twisted high concepts and sodden atmospherics, David Fincher (Seven, The Game, Fight Club) takes on something more concrete in Panic Room. A mother (Jodie Foster, reprising her moments in the dungeon in The Silence of the Lambs for about 100 minutes) and her pre-teen daughter (Leonardo DiCaprio look-alike Kristen Stewart) spend their first night in their new Upper East Side townhouse. Bought with money from the rich ex (Patrick Bauchau in the most masochistic performance so far this year), the place is the size of a small shopping mall and includes a "panic room," a sealed-off area impervious to evildoers. Bad guys (Forrest Whitaker, Jared Leto, Dwight Yoakam) break in, mother and daughter hide, and suspense mounts (in theory) as the bad guys — some worse than others — try to penetrate their refuge.

Filmmakers from Buster Keaton to Stanley Kubrick have explored the cinematic possibilities of a single, tightly delimited location, but Fincher barely rises to the level of John McTiernan in Die Hard; he’s content to indulge in gratuitous tricks (the key’s point of view in a keyhole; a sudden zoom into the filament of a flashlight bulb), and it all looks as if it had been shot through the lint filter of a clothes dryer. David Koepp’s script has some funny lines, and some of the characters spin off in quirky directions, but the careless attention to detail (the room has as many holes as the plot does) makes Panic Room structurally unsound.