Panic Room
A great thriller with so much class subtext, where the focus is all on the technical trickery and old-school CGI. Working Class people are fucked over badly, while aristos can withstand ugly home invasions and come out of it relaxed and looking for more places to gentrify.
It’s an unintended period piece too: no smartphones, no internet, bearer bonds, that old-school safe design. The teenage kid not being something out of Hackers is normal, she seems like the upper class crust punk, the intellectual type. This could have been made in 1950 without changing much of the script.
The robbers are three personalities: Jared Leto the ideas man, he thinks of himself highly but is a complete buffoon. Raoul is the psycho rules follower, and goes on a massive power trip. Our “hero” does the right thing after faltering, which means he gets busted when escaping with the money through the backdoor.
After a divorce, some idle-ish woman and her daughter are looking for new homes. They go see some preposterous mansion in Manhattan with three or four floors, inner elevator, and massive patio on the back. Truly a decadent home, for two people, but the husband is loaded, this is the way to get back at him.
The house belonged to some paranoid freak, so besides all that floor space, it has a panic room on the master bedroom, the urban version of a prepper bunker. The teenage kid finds it rad, but the mother hates those kind of things and wants removed.
They move in the next day, but don’t have that much stuff, the house is basically empty. There are boxes everywhere, they just want to sleep after a day of watching other people work.
Little do they know the home invaders came out to steal the safe located in the panic room. Jared Leto at his most obnoxious, with that Spring Breakers look (cornrows). Turns out he is actually related to the old guy, and as he was dying, he pampered him until he blurted out the contents of the safe and the guy who built it.
Our “hero” is the smart guy, building safes for rich people while being a lower class black guy himself. Just like any human working for aristos, he is basically disposable, and has some divorce-related debts to pay up. He’s the tragic linchpin of the film.
Raoul is just some lower class sociopath that tagged along. He’s not even trying to preserve the hostage’s integrity, he likes being in charge and to provoke pain. His hubris is their downfall.
The teenage kid is also am interesting character, she’s the rebel teenager from privilege, I can see her join some radical socialist fringe group or Extinction Rebellion.
Particularly after her experience: her parents divorce, she moves in with her mother to some mansion, which is broken into and she hides in the panic room.
After a couple hours, her diabetes kicks in and she nearly dies. Her mother cannot save her, and she gets locked in the room with the two robbers (Jared Leto had been assassinated). The psycho wants to kill her, but the nice guy saves her by giving her the super-sugar shot.
When they are about to leave, she is taken hostage by the psycho, and finds her father bleeding to death in a chair. Ducking at the last moment, her mother bludgeons the psycho with a sledgehammer and the good guy runs off.
But the psycho lives! He struggles with mother, and as he is about to crush her head with the sledgehammer, the good guy saves them again by shooting the psycho.
The good guy gets arrested by the swat team right away (but not shot Platoon-style, racism hasn’t been invented yet, this was the time of the Clinton crime bill).
The epilogue has mother and child relaxing in a park, looking for another house. But I really want to know about the good guy: is he rotting in jail? His kids are indigent orphans now? He was stealing the money for them, does that mean they are nothing but McDonald’s burger flippers now? So many unanswered questions.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.