Interesting the way a detail can work in different films. In Die Hard, Bruce Willis is a ridiculously tough hero, able to stand in rooms with a bunch of bad guys blasting bullets at him and leave them unscathed. The signifier for his essential humanity is the way his feet get cut by broken glass — the only time in the film he suffers injury.

Contrarily, we have Jodie Foster in Panic Room. Moved into a new place with her daughter, she’s very much vulnerable when the film kicks off. But as the story develops, and her daughter is threatened, she walks barefoot through a room with broken glass and, in full heroic mode at this point, is not troubled by pointy bits.

Some people are sniffy about Panic Room. Director David Fincher’s previous film was Fight Club, and its nebulous political satire suggested to some that Fincher was a man with something to say. Well, maybe, but that’s quite the burden to be shouldered with, and taking your own publicity seriously can lead to creative missteps — see what happened with David O. Russell and the dismal self-consciously meaningful I Heart Huckabees after the wonder that was Three Kings.

Panic Room is unashamedly a thriller, and a reminder of why Alfred Hitchcock spent his career at perfecting the form. The technical and storytelling chops needed to pull off an effective thriller mark out a director as being able to master any yarn they have an urge to tell.

There’s something of a sneer in the term ‘thriller’. The implication is that being thrilled is a baseline emotion, not as sophisticated as the delights of reflection, insight, or ennui, that other less physically active films seek to evoke. But really, thrillers go back to the roots of cinema, when audiences paid to be startled by fight scenes, daredevil tricks, and ladies strapped down in front of oncoming trains. Why not go further back still, to cave paintings, when bison would be depicted in an attempt to conjure them, and people would get excited and scared by the prospect of hunting for meat to feed the tribe.

That tribal sense is very much there in Panic Room. A mother and daughter are menaced by intruders, and rely on a safe room in the house to see them through. Only, mum is claustrophobic — and the daughter has diabetes, meaning sooner or later mum is going to have to leave the safety of the panic room to get her daughter’s insulin from elsewhere in the house.

Sure, the film thrives on technical excellence — bravura tracking shots through the house, sublime editing to get across what happens when mum leaves the room and the invaders try to get there ahead of her return, inventive ways to use the basic rules of the panic room itself. But none of that would mean a thing without the primal connection of mother and child. Bad people are trying to take Jodie Foster’s baby away from her, and nothing but nothing will get between them.

That bottom line is important to bear in mind. It’s easy to get lost in convoluted plotting and subtle motivations. But for real involving narrative, nothing beats tapping into fundamental emotions. For all his whizzbang tricks, David Fincher really gets that point, and everything in the film stems from that realisation.

Panic Room is a reminder of the visceral power of a straight line narrative where the stakes get higher and situations are reversed. I have yet to accomplish that feat in any of my writing, and seeing as I aspire to write quality thrillers, watching Panic Room again was a salutary reminder of how that job can be done with real flair and finesse.