A 'ROOM' WITH NO VIEW, BUT MANY VIEWPOINTS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

IT'S GIRLS VS. BOYS in ``Panic Room,'' David Fincher's deceptively simple but rather resonant home-invasion thriller.

In a lot of ways, this is the ``Seven'' and ``Fight Club'' director's most straightforward work. Jodie Foster plays a wealthy, recent divorcee spending her first night with her daughter in the Manhattan mansion she's just bought. The two take refuge in the panic room, an impregnable safety vault, when three intruders come looking for the previous owner's hidden fortune.

It becomes a battle of wits and a series of reversals, all enclosed in the single location. The film is fairly stripped-down, and suspenseful enough, if not exactly gut-wrenching. But if you want to look for thematic metaphors, Fincher and screenwriter David Koepp (``Jurassic Park,'' ``Mission: Impossible'') have deftly, slyly planted them along the way.

With quiet precision, Meg Altman (Foster) and her preteen daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) are set up as devastated and enraged by husband/father Stephan's (Patrick Bauchau) abandonment of them in favor of a young supermodel. He's a millionaire pharmaceuticals kingpin. Meg's new home was previously owned by an even richer, apparently just-as-selfish old guy (his heirs are fighting over his stingily distributed legacy).

When the three stooges - conflicted security expert Burnham (Forest Whitaker), loose cannon Junior (Jared Leto) and violent, ski-mask wearing ``professional'' criminal Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) - break in, they can be seen as yet another male threat to the Altman women's emotional and financial well-being. Now they're bearing the extra dimension of physical injury as well.

As Meg gradually, desperately turns the tables on the crooks, her motivations appear to evolve from a place of personal survival and motherly protection to an almost gleeful outburst of righteous feminine vengeance. It's a battle of the sexes operating on psychological levels the narrative rarely emphasizes, but never really forgets.

It brings out a primal intensity in Jodie Foster that we've never seen before. Always more of a technical, cerebral actress than an emotionally spontaneous one, it's a pleasurable revelation to see Foster feel out a role, both emotively and physically, with the well-marshaled gusto that she does here. It would not be fair to the actress to suggest that the fact she was pregnant throughout the ``Panic Room'' shoot may have contributed to the ferocious immediacy of her performance. But we will allow that it certainly didn't hurt.

As for Fincher, the project's built-in formal restraint did not dampen his visual inventiveness. The film's prowling camera work doesn't look as complicated as it actually was. (Due to creative conflicts, ``Seven'' cinematographer Darius Khondji was replaced midway through the shoot by Conrad W. Hall, but you'll be hard pressed to tell whose shots were whose.) It is brilliantly designed to give audiences an effective overview of what's going on in both warring camps.

``Panic Room'' is being compared to everything from Hitchcock's ``Rear Window'' to the full list of woman-in-peril movies from the ``Wait Until Dark'' genus. But in its narrative purity and its underlying meaning, the movie is its own, intriguing beast.

PANIC ROOM - Three stars

(Rated R: violence, language, children in jeopardy)

Starring: Jodie Foster, Forest Whitaker, Dwight Yoakam, Jared Leto, Kristen Stewart.

Director: David Fincher.

Running time: 1 hr. 48 min.

Playing: Wide release.

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Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) protects her young daughter (Kristen Stewart) from intruders, in ``Panic Room.''