Analysi of Film Openings

Panic Room

The first film opening I’m going to analyse is Panic Room (2002). This film was directed by David Fincher, the director of acclaimed films such as Se7en and Fight Club. This is the first film Fincher made in the three years after Fight Club (1999). David Fincher's films are well known for being very dark and gloomy, and from the first few shots of Panic Room, it looks like this film is not going to disappoint. The first shot we see in the opening sequence after the titles is of a woman laying on a bed, the camera zooms out slowly, with a quiet muffled sound of what sounds like the wind blowing. It is a large room, from this we can tell that the person is quite wealthy and they are going to have a large house or apartment. The camera zoom makes the woman seem very small, and the fact that we are not usually used to seeing a zoom like this makes almost seem paranormal. As the camera pans out further we find that the shots passes through the railings, therefore backing up the paranormal story hypothesis we had. The sound range expands and becomes more clear, we can hear rain, a usual convention in horror films. From this we start to build up an expectation of the story in our heads. The floating camera angles are smooth and emphasise some sort of danger. The camera twist all the down the stairs, towards a window, out of which we can see a pair of moving lights which we assume to be a cars headlights. The car stops outside this house. The camera stops, for the first time in the film so far, this shows that this thing outside is very important to the story. We see a black shape coming closer to the window. And a grinding noise, we assume is coming from a gate. The camera again zooms and pans at the same time, it follows the shape, the audience now think is a person, towards the front door, and zooms into the lock. The sound here starts to intensify, the sound we here is largely non-diegetic instrumentals, mixed in with rain. We here the door being tried, and conclude that these are thieves trying to break into the house. As the camera zooms back out, the sound intensifies again, maybe trying to show, a danger over signal, because the thieves can't get in. The camera pans back over to the window, where we see two figures. One presses his face against the window to see inside. This shot shows him as being very large, showing a lot of dominance in the scene. After this we pursue the continuous shot around the room through a kitchen, still very smooth. This makes the camera seem like a person. This makes the audience more fearful, because the camera now is not just a camera, it is a person in the eyes of the audience. Not once during the entire film does the camera go outside, this makes outside seem frightening, this is a daunting notion for the audience as mostly they know the outside to be safe. The film continues to go in the same light as the opening sequence, as it all takes place in one night. Overall this film is a brilliant example of Fincher thriller, and could probably be classed as a sort of neo-noir, because of the crime based story line, the Femme Fatale (Jodie Foster) and the amount of darkness and shadow used during the film.