Critical Reception
Critics called Panic Room "a high-tension narrative". They compared the film to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, both positively and negatively. Several critics thought the film was too mainstream after Fincher's Fight Club. Rotten Tomatoes reported that 77% of 180 sampled critics gave the film positive reviews and that it got a rating average of 6.8 out of 10. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 65 based on 36 reviews. Rotten Tomatoes reported of the critics' consensus: "Elevated by Fincher's directorial talent and Foster's performance, Panic Room is a well-crafted, above-average thriller."
Film critic Roger Ebert described Panic Room as close to "the ideal of a thriller existing entirely in a world of physical and psychological plausibility." Ebert wrote, "There are moments when I want to shout advice at the screen, but just as often the characters are ahead of me." The critic called Fincher "a visual virtuoso," writing, "He's also a master of psychological gamesmanship, and most of the movie will bypass fancy camerawork for classical intercutting between the cats and the mice (who sometimes trade sides of the board)." Ebert also applauded Foster's performance as "spellbinding", writing, "She has the gutsy, brainy resilience of a stubborn scrapper, and when all other resources fail her she can still think fast—and obliquely, like a chessmaster hiding one line of attack inside another."
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