Panic is a slow, quiet domestic melodrama about aging, family, and love. It's about obligations and breaking out from our genetic legacies. The main character, Alex (William H. Macey), works at home, loves his wife (Tracey Ullman) and young son. He has a strained relationship with his chilly father (Donald Sutherland) and mother (Barbara Bain) and he's having a bit of a mid-life crisis punctuated by trips to a shrink (John Ritter) and an infatuation with a "beautiful young thing" (Neve Campbell). In addition to his at-home job, Alex also works the family business, which causes problems because, well, the family business involves killing for money. Dad handles the business side. Son handles the dirty work. And it works like clockwork until Alex begins to have doubts.

While David's occupation is central to the plot of Panic (how could it not be?), it never dictates the tone of the project, which is to the great credit of the film's writer/director Henry Bromell. The film doesn't rely on flashy action scenes to depict Alex's occupation because killing is just his job. The scenes of violence are sudden, but chilling in how casually they're presented. Killing is (sometimes literally) just a walk in the park.

The fact that Alex's life involves life and death choices only amplified how ordinary his life otherwise is. He and his wife aren't drifting apart because of his job, it's just that time has caused their relationship to fray. Alex is a good father to his son, but with his own father, he's terrified. The essential story at Panic's heart is of a man trying to be a better father than his own father. And sometimes that can be accomplished by not taking your son out to kill squirrels with a handgun. Alex just wants to live a middle class family life and strangely, that's all his father wants for him as well. Their standards of how to live up to middle-class masculinity are just a little bit different. Some of the generational concerns are similar, it strikes me, to those presented in Monster's Ball — can you live a casual and fulfilling life when your business is death?

The film has violence and darkness, but the drama is mostly a human drama. It feels a bit like a John Dahl film at times, which is stylistically explained by the fact that Bromell uses Dahl's regular cinematographer Jeff Jur. Bromell understands that mood and silence can be provocative.

Panic is wonderfully acted. Macey effectively carries the film's dramatic weight without resorting to any of the (admittedly excellent) comic stylings that frequently color his work. He's passionate and understated and polite and yet he kills people for funny and he makes the contradiction seem logical and emotional. Sutherland and Bain are also impressive as his parents. Neither portrayal falls into caricature and they become increasingly fearsome as the film progresses, but fearsome in the most casual and mundane manner. Ullman plays it effectively straight as well and gives her character some depth and Campbell delivers what is easily her best performance (decide for yourself if that's damning praise). Understated is the overall tenor of everything here.

Panic doesn't really know how it wants to end. The tension built into the plot is supposed to rise from Alex's next potential victim and whether or not he'll carry out the job, but that's more of a device to explore the characters. And you do effectively understand the characters, you just aren't sure where they can go, so the ending is a slight disappointment. I just don't know where else it could have gone.

The end of the film also makes it clear that the women in Alex's life are of as much importance as the various father-son bonds. I guess I wish that Bromell had spent a little more time developing the three female characters, then. The mother, the wife, and the mistress all have hints at interesting back-stories and a couple more scenes could have helped expand their characters.

Panic got slightly overrated by a number of influential critics when it was released. Don't go into it expecting a a flashy hip cult film. It's small and intimate and effective. I'd put it in the same category as Monster's Ball and The Minus Man, if you're looking for films to compare it to.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older