Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart ride the elevator past Jared Leto en route to the 'Panic Room.'   Panic Room Starring Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart, and Forest Whitaker. Directed by David Fincher. Written by David Koepp. Rated R.

Moviegoers like to think that substance is more important than style, however they define those terms. One reason might be that too many filmmakers think "style" means making their movies look like tv commercials. However, we tend to dismiss pieces of pure entertainment as guilty pleasures, though we're happy to throw money at them. We give more consideration to films that are instructive and edifying and, more often than not, self-important and slow. Check the Oscar voting, if you don't think that's true. This cultural mindset is bad for everybody: It's why our comedies have gotten so dumb and our socially conscious dramas are too boring to raise the level of debate. It's time we realized that the way a movie is filmed is just as important, if not more so, than what it might have to say. Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven was one movie that succeeded gloriously on pure style, and now, so does David Fincher's Panic Room.

Panic Room begins with recent divorcée Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) moving into a handsome four-story Manhattan townhouse with her 11-year-old daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart). The place's high-tech safety feature is a "panic room" -- an impenetrable steel-encased ventilated vault with a bank of security monitors and enough supplies to enable the occupants to wait out intruders for days, if necessary. Meg finds use for it on her very first night in the new place, because three burglars who think the house is empty come calling. They're after millions of dollars hidden in the panic room, and when Meg and Sarah detect the intruders and lock themselves in there, a standoff ensues.

The actors don't get much to play: Dwight Yoakam is even scarier here than he was in Sling Blade, but Forest Whitaker is mostly glum, and Jared Leto seems to be channeling Jason Lee's mannerisms. Jodie Foster acts in too few movies, and her intelligence and scrappiness are both welcome, but she doesn't accomplish anything here that she didn't in The Silence of the Lambs.

The script by David Koepp (Mission: Impossible and the first two Jurassic Park films) is all action and a few judiciously placed wisecracks. The story has no intriguing subtexts or larger themes, and the characterization is almost nonexistent. (Although the film gets credit for pointedly making its bad guys stupid. In most movies, the bad guys are stupid because it's convenient for the good guys, but here their stupidity makes them more dangerous.) There's nothing intellectual, ground-breaking, or provocative in this thriller.

That'll seem strange to loyal fans of director David Fincher. This movie has none of the ostentatious weirdness that has earned him his cult following: It doesn't have Seven's sophomoric misanthropy, The Game's elaborate conspiracy plot, or Fight Club's twisted wit. This is as much of a paycheck job as his debut film, Alien 3.

It sure doesn't feel like a paycheck job, though. Fincher takes a script for a perfectly ordinary thriller and turns it into a brilliant stylistic exercise. Instead of the hyperactive, quick-cut look of Seven and Fight Club, the director takes his cue from the single set and adopts a sinuous, elegant style. The blue-filtered shots give the film an austere, high-contrast look -- if he'd been really adventurous, he'd have filmed this thing in black and white.

Much of the action takes place in the small confines of the panic room, but Fincher doesn't milk it for claustrophobic tension as you might expect. Instead, he uses opportunities to let his camera roam free through the house. His tracking shots go through walls, creep along floors, and snake around corners. One bravura unbroken shot starts with a close-up of Sarah sleeping in her bedroom, backs into the hall, rappels down the stairwell to a silent landing on the ground floor, and pirouettes to take in the bad guys pulling up to the front door. During a scene where Meg ventures out of the panic room, Fincher even takes that most hackneyed device -- a slow-motion sequence -- and turns it into something trancelike and mesmerizingly beautiful as well as gripping. (Shades of Brian De Palma at his late-'70s best.)

These visuals take place in the context of a classically proportioned suspense film. Most thriller directors are afraid to lose the crowd's attention for a second and take their movies at an exhausting breakneck pace. Fincher knows when to go fast and when to bring things to a stop. Notice the subtle way he drops clues about one character's medical condition; you might miss it until it kicks in with a vengeance at a critical moment.

In another director's hands, you can easily imagine this movie going direct to video or popping up on cable tv. Fincher's artistry, however, makes Panic Room an authentically involving thriller that'll probably earn enough money to let him make another film as far-out as Fight Club. It also proves that he's capable of making mainstream entertainment as good as anybody else's. Who's to say that isn't as great a gift?

You can reach Kristian Lin at kristian.lin@fwweekly.com.