Before she was a teen girl who fell in love with a vampire, prior to her string of acclaimed indie flicks, and years ahead of her stint as one of Charlie's Angels, Kristen Stewart splashed onto the Hollywood scene with her breakout film role in 2002's Panic Room.
In director David Fincher's thriller, Stewart stars as Sarah Altman, the daughter of Jodie Foster's character Meg Altman. The mother-daughter pair move into a new home — a multi-story brownstone nestled in New York City's Upper West Side neighborhood — following Meg's recent divorce. You may predict where the plot is headed — that Meg and Sarah's new home is haunted by entities hungry for revenge — but Panic Room plays out differently. Meg and Sarah discover that the previous owner of the home built into it a "panic room," a fortified hiding place to protect occupants in the event of a home invasion, natural disaster, or other threat of the same ilk. But that's not all that's inside the home.
Trouble comes knocking on the Altmans' door the very first night they move in: the grandson of the previous owner, Junior (Jared Leto), and his two accomplices Burnham (Forest Whitaker) and Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) break into the home in search of $3 million locked in a floor safe inside the panic room. The Altmans engage in a life-or-death game of cat-and-mouse with the trio of home invaders, who are determined to seize the money by whatever means necessary.
Panic Room is available to stream on Netflix until January 31, 2020.
