10 Movies like Panic Room you must watch

By Miguel Fernández - July 24, 2023 (Last updated: September 12, 2024)
10 Movies like Panic Room you must watch
By Miguel Fernández - July 24, 2023 (Last updated: September 12, 2024)

We discuss 10 Movies like Panic Room you must watch. Add these well-recommended and highly-rated films to your watch list.

David Fincher’s Panic Room is a 2002 thriller starring Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart, and Forest Whitaker, about three intruders who break into a house and realize that what they are looking for is inside the panic room, where the mom and her young daughter are hiding.

If you’ve seen it recently and are looking for similar movies to Panic Room, here are 10 recommendations for you.

10 Movies like Panic Room

Rear Window (1954)

Anything that David Fincher accomplished with his suspense thriller movies like Panic Room, Hitchcock did first, and sometimes better. So it’s hard for us not to recommend his magnum opus in the genre, Rear Window.

The movie follows Jim Stewart, a professional photographer who is stuck at home with a broken leg and realizes that one of the neighbors he’s spying on with his camera may have been murdered.

The Game (1997)

If you are looking for similar movies to Panic Room, we might as well go down the director’s filmography. The Game was a movie that David Fincher made a few years before Panic Room, but it shares some of those adrenaline rushes.

The story follows Michael Douglas, who gets a game gifted for her birthday, but as he gets deeper and deeper into playing it, the lines between reality and fun start to blur.

Phone Booth (2002)

Colin Farrell picks up a phone ringing inside a phone booth in New York and finds out that a deadly assassin is on the other end of the line. The caller presents Farrell with a choice, to either convince the police of his story so that they won’t hunt him down and kill him, or hang up and be killed.

Once again, an all-killer, no-filler story that will not allow you to look elsewhere during its 80-minute runtime.

Enough (2002)

This 2002 crime drama follows Jennifer López as she marries a seemingly-perfect man who will soon turn out to be extremely abusive and violent. She will soon have to run for her life.

While this may not be as physically claustrophobic as Panic Room, it definitely feels that way emotionally.

Collateral (2004)

Other similar movies to Panic Room may include this 2004 action thriller about a taxi driver (Jamie Foxx) hired to drive a man (Tom Cruise) around town. But the driver will soon realize he’s now hostage to the passenger, who is actually a contract killer.

One of the modern classics in the action thriller genre, most of the adrenaline rush present in similar movies to Panic Room is also part of the experience here.

Flightplan (2005)

Jodie Foster plays an engineer in this nail-biting thriller. After waking up in the middle of a long flight, she realizes her daughter is no longer by her side. But as she starts looking for her inside the plane, she is told repeatedly by the crew that her daughter was never on board.

If you are looking for fast-paced thrillers similar to Panic Room, Flightplan might be just for you!

Zodiac (2007)

This is more crime-drama than suspense thriller like Panic Room, but it’s quite hard not to recommend Zodiac when talking about similar movies to one of David Fincher’s pictures.

The story follows the journalistic investigation of the Zodiac killer, who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s with his murders and subsequent letters to newspapers that must get published.

Buried (2010)

After being attacked by a group of insurgents in Iraq, Paul (Ryan Reynolds) wakes up inside a coffin with just a lighter and a cell phone. What follows is a gripping, 90-minute thriller where we see little more than his face as he reacts to the several challenges that being buried underground presents.

The Call (2013)

Halle Berry plays this emergency-line operator who gets devastated when a teenager on the other end of the line is killed by her being slightly reckless when trying to save her life. Devastated, she leaves the front-line job and starts teaching it to newcomers. However, she is forced to return to it when a few months later, another teenager calls crying for help and the rookie operator who picks up the phone can’t handle it.

Don’t Breathe (2016)

This 2016 thriller was compared a lot at the time of its release to David Fincher’s thriller, so if you are looking for similar movies to Panic Room, this seems like a good place to start. Don’t Breathe follows the perspective of three thieves who break into a blind war veteran, thinking it will be an easy target, only to realize that there’s more than meets the eye with him.

Do you have any other recommendations for movies like Panic Room? Let us know in the comments.

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