Se7en is an American neo-noir psychological crime thriller directed by David Fincher, known as one of Hollywood's most disturbed directors. This crafted thriller is a product of the year 2020. Kidding, the film came out in the year 1995. Shocking, right? But it certainly passes off as something that came out in 2020. The screenplay is written by Andrew Kevin Walker.
The film has a star cast of Brad Pitt as David Mills, Gwyneth Paltrow as Tracy Mills, Morgan Freeman as William Somerset and Kevin Spacey as John Doe. The story revolves around David Mills, the detective who’s recently moved to the seemingly wretched and unnamed city where he begins working side by a soon-to-retire detective William Somerset who is plagued by nightmares and needs a metronome to fall asleep. They stumble upon an interesting case, a killer whose design is inspired by the seven deadly sins. A killer playing God. Or Satan. The duo is quite contrasting, with Mills governed by emotions and impulses and Somerset being calculative and cautious. They banter throughout the film but eventually end up forming quite a personal relationship. It’s astounding considering the juxtaposition between the two characters. The string of murders begins with gluttony, a morbidly obese man who dies with his face shoved down in a plate of mouldy food and ends at wr- well, if I tell you now, what would be the fun in that?
Just like Zodiac and Gone Girl, Fincher ends the film in the most annoyingly ambiguous way possible. Not complaining, though. One of the fun aspects of crime thrillers, especially the serial killer ones is that you get to see the dirty work of the killer. But Fincher deliberately leaves out the act of killing and just serves us with a platter of mangled corpses and vivid details about how they were killed, letting our imagination run wild. There are plenty of interesting things about this film, and no the peculiarly killed cadavers are not it. It would have to be the effortlessly added literary references spread throughout the film. From Dante’s Inferno to excerpts from Merchant of Venice, this story has it all. And the cherry on top is the ending scene with Ernest Hemmingway’s quote.
The cinematography is quite exceptional. The wide-angle shots are Fincher’s speciality and can be seen in a lot of his work. The frames are also very particular and on par with the character; Tracy’s is very organised and David's is quite the opposite. The infamous chase scene is controlled and restrictive and unlike a lot of films where the camera follows the chase steadily, it’s as unstable as the character’s running. This leads to a seamless tension build-up. Se7en also has a starker colour palette as the footage undergoes a bleach bypass, which draws out edges and makes it look more resolved and contrast-y. Almost like a whitewash.
Se7en leaves us with an unsettling feeling. Like it should. The film truly exposes the depravity of humankind. A world which is so deeply flawed with people equally flawed doing terribly flawed things and nobody pays much heed to it because, well, it’s common. Sure, John Doe’s pretty bonkers for playing God or Satan, whatever you’d like to call it. But if you keep his messiah complex and psychopathy tendencies aside for a second, and really consider what he’s saying, does it still seem entirely bonkers?