Panic Room certainly seemed to scare a lot of critics, even those who afterwards concluded that the script didn't make a whole lot of sense. Stephen Hunter writes in the Washington Post: "The movie is powerfully manipulative, quite clever and full of evil ambition. The fabulousness of the star [Jodie Foster] somehow tightens the screws even more." Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times also praises Foster. "She is spellbinding," he writes. "She has the gutsy, brainy resilience of a stubborn scrapper, and when all other resources fail her she can still think fast--and obliquely, like a chessmaster hiding one line of attack inside another." Jane Sumner in the Dallas Morning News observes that the film appears to synthesize elements of from many other thrillers. "It's a solidly constructed, entertaining thriller," she writes, "that stops short of true inspiration." Geoff Pevere in the Toronto Star pays the movie a similar left-handed compliment: "While The Panic Room has moments of pyrotechnical flourish that verge on bravura," he comments, "the whole thing amounts to considerably less than their sum."