seven movie reviews

“Seven,” a dark, grisly, horrifying and intelligent thriller, may be too disturbing for many people, I imagine, although if you can bear to watch, it you will see filmmaking of a high order. It tells the story of two detectives – one ready to retire, the other at the start of his career – and their attempts to capture a perverted serial killer who is using the Seven Deadly Sins as his scenario.

As the movie opens, we meet Somerset ( Morgan Freeman ), a meticulous veteran cop who lives a lonely bachelor’s life in what looks like a furnished room. Then he meets Mills ( Brad Pitt ), an impulsive young cop who actually asked to be transferred into Somerset’s district. The two men investigate a particularly gruesome murder, in which a fat man was tied hand and feet and forced to eat himself to death.

His crime was the crime of Gluttony. Soon Somerset and Mills are investigating equally inventive murders involving Greed, Sloth, Lust and the other deadly sins. In each case, the murder method is appropriate, and disgusting (one victim is forced to cut off a pound of his own flesh; another is tied to a bed for a year; a third, too proud of her beauty, is disfigured and then offered the choice of a call for help or sleeping pills). Somerset concludes that the killer, “ John Doe ,” is using his crimes to preach a sermon.

The look of “Seven” is crucial to its effect. This is a very dark film, the gloom often penetrated only by the flashlights of the detectives. Even when all the lights are turned on in the apartments of the victims, they cast only wan, hopeless pools of light.

Although the time of the story is the present, the set design suggests the 1940s; Gary Wissner, the art director, goes for dark blacks and browns, deep shadows, lights of deep yellow, and a lot of dark wood furniture. It rains almost all the time.

In this jungle of gloom, Somerset and Mills tread with growing alarm. Somerset intuits that the killer is using books as the inspiration for his crimes, and studies Dante, Milton and Chaucer for hints. Mills settles for the Cliff Notes versions. A break in the case comes with Somerset’s sudden hunch that the killer might have a library card. But the corpses pile up, in cold fleshy detail, as disturbingly graphic as I’ve seen in a commercial film. The only glimmers of life and hope come from Tracy ( Gwyneth Paltrow ), Mills’ wife.

A movie like this is all style. The material by itself could have been handled in many ways, but the director, David Fincher (“Alien 3”), goes for evocative atmosphere, and the writer, Andrew Kevin Walker , writes dialogue that for Morgan Freeman, in particular, is wise, informed and poetic. (“Anyone who spends a significant amount of time with me,” he says, “finds me disagreeable.”) Eventually, it becomes clear that the killer’s sermon is being preached directly to the two policemen, and that in order to understand it, they may have to risk their lives and souls.

“Seven” is unique in one detail of its construction; it brings the killer onscreen with half an hour to go, and gives him a speaking role. Instead of being simply the quarry in a chase, he is revealed as a twisted but articulate antagonist, who has devised a horrible plan for concluding his sermon. (The actor playing the killer is not identified by name in the ads or opening credits, and so I will leave his identity as another of his surprises.) “Seven” is well-made in its details, and uncompromising in the way it presents the disturbing details of the crimes. It is certainly not for the young or the sensitive. Good as it is, it misses greatness by not quite finding the right way to end. All of the pieces are in place, all of the characters are in position, and then – I think the way the story ends is too easy. Satisfying, perhaps. But not worthy of what has gone before.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

• Morgan Freeman as Somerset
• Gwyneth Paltrow as Tracy
• Brad Pitt as Mills
• Richard Roundtree as Talbot
• Andrew Kevin Walker

Directed by

• David Fincher

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Seven Reviews

A stone cold classic, especially from a technical point of view. It's incredibly moody, cements a number of tropes for serial killer/crime texts, and (despite the presence of Spacey), John Doe and that finale are iconic.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 23, 2024

When Seven, with its velvety world of bottomless evil, taps you on the shoulder, your instinct will be to dive under the theater seat.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2024

I wouldn't go so far as to call David Fincher's Seven the most terrifying film ever, but it's right up there on the top shelf with Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 29, 2024

Seven doesn't take you to hell and back; it takes you to hell and keeps you there, looking around and wondering how it had come to this.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Mar 29, 2024

There is no denying that Seven is a deeply unpleasant movie. But I believe it is a fine one, too. It doesn't glory in its depravity, but keeps a distance from it.

All the literary allusions and cinema school self-consciousness can't save Fincher from drowning in the tawdry waste of this dreadful, brutal, abusive movie. Go, our little moviemaker, and sin no more.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 29, 2024

The performance that eventually emerges from the shadows gives both Anthony Hopkins and Anthony Perkins a run for their money. By the end of the film you'll run to your car and lock the doors.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 29, 2024

There's a great deal of talent on display in the serial-killer thriller Seven, which only makes it worse when you finally recognize this is a heartless, soulless, pointless exercise in audience manipulation.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 29, 2024

The results of the killings are needlessly grotesque and don't really serve the smart screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker and the artful direction of David Fincher. All of this talent is worth seeing if you can look past the gruesome details.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 29, 2024

Seven, a dark, grisly, horrifying and intelligent thriller, may be too disturbing for many people, I imagine, although if you can bear to watch it, you will see filmmaking of a high order.

A spectacular piece of cinema -- a vision of evil triumphant, distilled into deadly psychic poison by a world that is itself corrupt and fallen. After Alien 3, Fincher shows himself a real artist of the medium.

I do not expect to see many better pictures in 1996... Seven is a dazzling movie and it engages the mind while jabbing the solar plexus.

It's a case where a traditional but nicely twisted plot is married smartly to MTV visuals, to the uncommon advantage of them both.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 29, 2024

Fincher's one previous film, Alien 3, shared the same dingy colours and downbeat mood. But where that film stumbled over its tedious plot, Seven almost dances with vitality.

Seven is gripping and intricate in a sordid way, and Freeman and Pitt, physical and spiritual opposites, become an oddly satisfying pair, but I was happy when the movie had played its last trick on me and could hold me no longer.

Did anyone else believe that MTV-video veteran David Fincher ruined his feature film career when it started?... Apparently not the honchos at New Line Cinema, who handed Fincher an interesting, grisly idea for a movie, then allowed him to bury it.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Mar 29, 2024

Each actor reaches deep and brings forth a character far greater than the one written; for all its disappointments, the film can pierce the heart. As for Fincher, he pierces the heart with genius.

A murky, sometimes disturbing rehash of The Silence of the Lambs genre whose studied obscurity, formulaic thrills, and mannered disgust don't quite conceal its loose ends and predictable plot twists.

It's a scary piece of work.

A director who seems to feel undisguised Envy for The Silence of the Lambs, but will end up inspiring Wrath through overblown Pride in his own intrusive touch.

• New Line Cinema

Summary Two New York City detectives (Pitt, Freeman) find themselves on the trail of a vicious serial killer that chooses his victims according to the seven deadly sins. (New Line Cinema)

Directed By : David Fincher

Written By : Andrew Kevin Walker

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Morgan Freeman

Kevin spacey, andrew kevin walker, dead man at 1st crime scene, daniel zacapa, detective taylor at first murder, gwyneth paltrow, john cassini, officer davis, gluttony victim, peter crombie, dr. o'neill, reg e. cathey, dr. santiago, r. lee ermey, police captain, george christy, workman at door of somerset's office, endre hules, hawthorne james, george the night guard at the library, william davidson, first guard at the library, bob collins, second guard at the library, jimmy dale hartsell, library janitor, richard roundtree, charline su, tv news reporter, dominique jennings, critic reviews.

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• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Two detectives, a rookie and a veteran, hunt a serial killer who uses the seven deadly sins as his motives. Two detectives, a rookie and a veteran, hunt a serial killer who uses the seven deadly sins as his motives. Two detectives, a rookie and a veteran, hunt a serial killer who uses the seven deadly sins as his motives.

• David Fincher
• Andrew Kevin Walker
• Morgan Freeman
• Kevin Spacey
• 2K User reviews
• 166 Critic reviews
• 65 Metascore
• 29 wins & 44 nominations total

Top cast 65

• Dead Man at 1st Crime Scene
• (as Andy Walker)

• Detective Taylor at First Murder

• Officer Davis
• Gluttony Victim

• Dr. O'Neill

• Dr. Santiago

• Police Captain

• Workman at Door of Somerset's Office

• George the Night Guard at the Library
• First Guard at the Library
• (as Roscoe Davidson)
• Second Guard at the Library
• Library Janitor

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia As preparation for his traumatic scene in the interrogation room, Leland Orser would hyperventilate, so that his body would be overly saturated with oxygen. He also did not sleep for a few days, in order to achieve his character's disoriented look.
• Goofs When the detectives are at the door of John Doe's apartment, John walks into the hallway. He sees them, drops his bag of groceries, pulls a gun, shoots, and runs. The bag is now on the floor, with its contents spilled out. When Mills gives chase, he runs down the same hallway. The dropped bag of groceries has vanished.

David Mills : Wait, I thought all you did was kill innocent people.

John Doe : Innocent? Is that supposed to be funny? An obese man... a disgusting man who could barely stand up; a man who if you saw him on the street, you'd point him out to your friends so that they could join you in mocking him; a man, who if you saw him while you were eating, you wouldn't be able to finish your meal. After him, I picked the lawyer and I know you both must have been secretly thanking me for that one. This is a man who dedicated his life to making money by lying with every breath that he could muster to keeping murderers and rapists on the streets!

David Mills : Murderers?

John Doe : A woman...

David Mills : Murderers, John, like yourself?

John Doe : [interrupts] A woman... so ugly on the inside she couldn't bear to go on living if she couldn't be beautiful on the outside. A drug dealer, a drug dealing pederast, actually! And let's not forget the disease-spreading whore! Only in a world this shitty could you even try to say these were innocent people and keep a straight face. But that's the point. We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it's common, it's trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon, and night. Well, not anymore. I'm setting the example. What I've done is going to be puzzled over and studied and followed... forever.

• Crazy credits SPOILER: Kevin Spacey 's name is not included in the opening titles to keep the John Doe intrigue going. To compensate, he is listed twice in the closing credits: once before the credits start rolling and once in the rolling credits in order of appearance.
• Alternate versions USA laserdisc edition adds a few scenes deleted from theatrical release as a bonus at the end of the program, including: a prologue where Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is going to buy a country house. He uses his switchblade (seen many times in the final cut, but not explained) to cut out a small piece of wallpaper. There is an extended scene at the Mills' when David (Brad Pitt) is playing with his dogs, and Somerset talks to Tracy. He tells her about the house and shows her the wallpaper. She tells him that it wouldn't be such a good idea to show it to David, saying "He wouldn't understand.". These two scenes establish Somerset's characters better, and the second one helps the viewer understand why the wife chooses Somerset to talk to when she gets pregnant. She knows that Somerset is much more sensible than her husband, and will understand her. The second one however was probably dumped earlier since it is included among the dailies and outtakes and the first one appears as a deleted scene.
• Connections Edited into L'affaire Caravage (2019)
• Soundtracks Closer (Precursor) Written by Trent Reznor Performed by Nine Inch Nails Courtesy of Nothing/TVT/Interscope Records By Arrangement with Warner Special Products and TVT Records

User reviews 2K

• TheLittleSongbird
• May 17, 2010
• Why do some of the SWAT guys call Mills and Somerset "Dicks"?
• How does a 1995 movie shot in simple locations with no big scenes cost $33 million?
• Who was originally considered for the role of John Doe?
• September 22, 1995 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Pacific Electric Building, Los Angeles, California, USA (Police Headquarters)
• Cecchi Gori Pictures
• New Line Cinema
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $33,000,000 (estimated)
• $100,125,643
• $13,949,807
• Sep 24, 1995
• $327,333,559

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 7 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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"Seven" is dark, grim and terrific. An intensely claustrophobic, gut-wrenching thriller about two policemen's desperate efforts to stop an ingenious serial killer whose work is inspired by the seven deadly sins, this weirdly off-kilter suspender goes well beyond the usual police proceperate efforts to stop an ingenious serial killer whose work is inspired by the seven deadly sins, this weirdly off-kilter suspener goes well beyond the usual police procedural or killer-on-a-rampage yarn due to a fine script, striking craftsmanship and a masterful performance by Morgan Freeman. With Brad Pitt top-billed, this New Line release stands a good chance of a strong opening, and while a substantial cult following seems assured for so edgy and bizarre a film, its relentless bleakness and heavily downbeat dramatic trajectory could easily work against sustained mainstream acceptance.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

• Remember Me 14 years ago
• Shutter Island 14 years ago
• Green Zone 14 years ago

“Seven” is dark, grim and terrific. An intensely claustrophobic, gut-wrenching thriller about two policemen’s desperate efforts to stop an ingenious serial killer whose work is inspired by the seven deadly sins, this weirdly off-kilter suspender goes well beyond the usual police procedural or killer-on-a-rampage yarn due to a fine script, striking craftsmanship and a masterful performance by Morgan Freeman. With Brad Pitt top-billed, this New Line release stands a good chance of a strong opening, and while a substantial cult following seems assured for so edgy and bizarre a film, its relentless bleakness and heavily downbeat dramatic trajectory could easily work against sustained mainstream acceptance.

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David Fincher’s second feature, after “Alien 3,” cuts against most expectations for this sort of genre piece: It’s not a buddy picture; the murders themselves are not actually depicted, and the usual gritty big-city realism has been replaced by a highly stylized, borderlinearty visual conception that greatly cranks up the psychological and physical intensity of the drama.

Popular on Variety

What’s more, the built-in potential for an overly schematic approach to day-by-day, sin-by-sin murders largely has been skirted by first-time screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker by placing over the killings the larger are of the often difficult relationship between the world-weary veteran cop William Somerset (Freeman) and the cocky newcomer due to replace him, David Mills (Pitt).

At the outset, they can barely tolerate each other; to the burned out, highly learned Somerset, it’s a joke that the impulsive, intuitive, arrogant youngster will be able to fill his shoes when he leaves the force in a week, just as young Mills has little patience for his superior’s methodical, more formal ways.

Obliged to take the kid on his rounds, Somerset pursues an investigation of the death of an enormously obese man who appears to have exploded from eating too much. The next day, an influential defense attorney is found gruesomely murdered, and when the words “Gluttony” and “Greed” are discovered, respectively , at the scenes, Somerset correctly predicts that there will be five more murders to cover sloth, pride, lust, envy and wrath.

Faced with this scenario, Somerset instantly repairs to the library to brush up on his Dante and Chaucer in search of clues. Mills has no time for this sort of boring research or for his partner’s intellectual fastidiousness in general, so it falls to his helpful wife, Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), to act as go-between and get them to break bread together.

But even with the police working diligently, the murders continue apace, one more grotesque than the last. After three days, Somerset makes the major breakthrough of learning the killer’s name and tracing him to his apartment, but the police just miss snaring him, leading to the remaining murders and a tense final sequence in which the brilliant fiend leads the two cops into the countryside on a promise of serving up the last two bodies.

The unidentified city in which the grisly yarn unravels is subject to heavy rain through the early days of the inquiry, which provides the first element in Fincher’s channeling of images. As if to provide the viewer with partial blinders to severely control what one will see, the director, his virtuoso French cinematographer, Darius Khondji (“Delicatessen,” “Before the Rain”), and production designer Arthur Max (a former Fillmore East and rock concert lighting designer) have sculpted a dark, murky world, parts of which are illuminated only by flash light and much of the rest of which is suffused in a pea-soup green that defies penetration.

Beginning with the avant-garde-style credits and on through the superbly off-center widescreen lensing; Richard Francis-Bruce’s nerve-jangling cutting; Howard Shore’s fin score, which mixes tension with a sobering gravity; and the incredibly dense sound mix, the film has been hand-tooled with precision and to powerful effect.

Some viewers may find the result too calculated and artificial, and a measure of European art film preciousness spills out from some of the compositions, but there is no denying the enormous skill that has been brought to the telling of a story that carried with it strong potential for deja vu.

But decisively putting the picture in the must-see category is Freeman’s supremely nuanced, moving performance as the seasoned, bruised and solitary Somerset. Speaking with great deliberation and precision, Freeman subtly conveys the essence of this lifelong bachelor who has simply seen too much in his time but is neither triumphant nor defeated by the sum of his experience.

That Freeman is a superb actor is no secret, but here he also displays big-times movie star presence in the manner of such greats as Spencer Tracyand Gary Cooper, shown in the way he uses pauses, looks and quiet underplaying to rivet the attention of the other characters as well as the audience. This is screen acting at its best.

To speak about Pitt’s skills at this point in the same breath as Freeman’s is impossible, but he does turn in a determined, energetic, creditable job as the eager young detective who undergoes a drastic change in a week’s time. The balance between Pitt’s brash emotionalism and profanity and Freeman’s measured control and well mannered correctness actually works surprisingly well.

Gwyneth Paltrow gives as much human dimension as possible to her few scenes as Pitt’s sensitive, uncertain wife.

Except for a chase sequence, pic features no overt violence, but the gruesome handiwork of the killer is shown in detail, in part courtesy of special makeup effects wiz Rob Bottin. Effect is akin to looking at unexpurgated autopsy and murder scene photographs, which will be quite enough for all but the strongest stomachs.

• Production: A New Line Cinema release of an Arnold Kopelson production. Produced by Kopelson, Phyllis Carlyle. Executive producers, Gianni Nunnari, Dan Kolsrud. Anne Kopelson. Co-producers, Stephen Brown, Nana Greenwald, Sanford Panitch. Co-executive producers, Lynn Harris, Richard Saperstein. Directed by David Fincher. Screenplay, Andrew Kevin Walker.
• Crew: Camera (Deluxe color; Panavision widescreen), Darius Khondji; editor, Richard Fraincis-Bruce; music, Howard Shore; production design, Arthur Max; art direction, Gary Wissner; set design, Elizabeth Lapp, Lori Rowbathom, HugoSantiago; set decoration, Clay A. Griffith; costume design, Michael Kaplan; sound (Dolby SR), Willie D, Burton; special makeup effects, Rob Bottin; associate producer, Michele Platt; assistant director, Nilo Otero; casting, Billy Hopkins. Reviewed at Sony Studios, Culver City, Sept, 13. 1995. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 125 MIN.
• With: David Mills - Brad Pitt William Somerset - Morgan Freeman Tracy Mills - Gwyneth Paltrow Police Captain - R. Lee Ermey Talbot - Richard Rondtree California - John C. McGinley Mrs. Gould - Julie Araskog Greasy FBI Man - Mark Boone Jr. Officer Davis - John Cassini Dr. Santiago - Reginald E. Cathey Dr. O'Neill - Peter Crombie John Doe - Kevin Spacey With: Hawthorne James, Michael Massee, Leland Orser, Richard Portnow, Richard Schiff, Pamela Tyson.

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WhichFilm | Film Reviews | Audience Film Reviews

Seven (1995)

“Seven,” directed by David Fincher and released in 1995, is a dark and atmospheric psychological thriller that immerses viewers in a world of moral decay and psychological torment. With its chilling portrayal of a serial killer’s twisted game and the two detectives determined to bring him to justice, “Seven” stands as a landmark film in the genre, known for its gritty visuals, haunting atmosphere, and thought-provoking exploration of human nature.

Plot: The film follows seasoned detective William Somerset (played by Morgan Freeman), who is on the brink of retirement, and his young and impulsive partner, David Mills (Brad Pitt), as they investigate a series of brutal murders that seem to follow the pattern of the seven deadly sins. As the detectives delve deeper into the mind of the sadistic killer (played by Kevin Spacey), they become entangled in a cat-and-mouse game that pushes the boundaries of their morality and sanity.

Atmosphere and Visuals: “Seven” is characterized by its atmospheric and foreboding tone. The rain-soaked streets of an unnamed city, the decaying urban landscapes, and the dimly lit interiors contribute to the film’s sense of dread and hopelessness. David Fincher’s meticulous direction and use of cinematography create a visually striking and oppressive atmosphere that reflects the moral decay and despair at the heart of the story.

Exploration of the Human Condition: At its core, “Seven” is a chilling examination of the human condition and the dark depths of the human psyche. The film delves into the themes of sin, guilt, and the consequences of unchecked human desires. Each murder represents one of the seven deadly sins, serving as a reflection of the flaws and moral failings that exist within society. “Seven” forces viewers to confront their own capacity for evil and question the boundaries of morality.

Character Dynamics and Performances: Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt deliver compelling performances as the contrasting detectives. Freeman portrays Somerset as a wise and introspective investigator burdened by the darkness he has witnessed throughout his career. Pitt brings youthful energy and emotional intensity to the role of Mills, a detective driven by his desire to make a difference. The chemistry between the two actors adds depth and complexity to their evolving relationship as they navigate the psychological labyrinth set before them.

Unforgettable Climax: “Seven” is renowned for its shocking and unforgettable climax, which exposes the full extent of the killer’s twisted plan. The film’s conclusion confronts viewers with a devastating moral dilemma, leaving a lasting impact and provoking intense discussion and debate. The climax, along with the film’s ambiguous final moments, leaves audiences haunted by the dark truths it exposes.

Critical Reception and Cultural Impact: “Seven” was met with critical acclaim upon its release, praised for its atmospheric direction, gripping screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, and the performances of its cast. The film’s success solidified David Fincher’s reputation as a master of psychological thrillers. “Seven” has since become a cultural touchstone, influencing subsequent films in the genre and leaving an indelible mark on popular culture.

Legacy and Enduring Significance: “Seven” remains a benchmark in the psychological thriller genre, admired for its uncompromising depiction of violence and its exploration of human depravity. The film’s impact can be seen in its enduring popularity, its inclusion on lists of the greatest films of all time, and its influence on subsequent works that seek to capture its dark and atmospheric storytelling.

Conclusion: “Seven” is a haunting and visceral journey into the depths of the human psyche. With its gripping storyline, atmospheric visuals, and powerhouse performances, the film continues to captivate audiences and provoke contemplation on the nature of sin, morality, and the fragility of the human condition. “Seven” stands as a testament to David Fincher’s masterful storytelling and remains a timeless classic in the realm of psychological thrillers.

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Seven, directed by David Fincher and released in 1995, is a masterfully crafted psychological thriller that immerses viewers in a dark and chilling world. With its atmospheric cinematography, intricate storytelling, and outstanding performances, the film stands as a benchmark in the genre. The film follows the story of two detectives, the seasoned and cynical Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and the impulsive and ambitious Detective Mills (Brad Pitt), as they investigate a series of gruesome murders inspired by the seven deadly sins. As the detectives delve deeper into the case, they are drawn into a twisted game of cat and mouse with a meticulous and sadistic serial killer (Kevin Spacey). One of the greatest strengths of Seven lies in its atmospheric and immersive world-building. From the rain-soaked streets of a bleak and decaying city to the grim and unsettling crime scenes, the film creates a palpable sense of dread and despair. The meticulously crafted cinematography by Darius Khondji captures the gritty and dark tones of the narrative, enhancing the film's ominous atmosphere. The performances in Seven are exceptional across the board. Morgan Freeman delivers a commanding portrayal of the wise and world-weary Detective Somerset, bringing depth and gravitas to the character. Brad Pitt shines as the hot-headed Detective Mills, capturing the character's vulnerability and volatility with conviction. Kevin Spacey's portrayal of the enigmatic serial killer is chilling and haunting, leaving a lasting impact on viewers. David Fincher's direction is meticulous and precise, perfectly complementing the film's dark and unsettling tone. His keen attention to detail and ability to create tension through pacing and editing are on full display in Seven. The film's narrative unfolds with a deliberate pace, gradually building suspense and keeping viewers on the edge of their seats. The shocking and visceral climax remains one of the most memorable and impactful sequences in cinematic history. The screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker is a dark and thought-provoking exploration of human nature and the destructive forces that lurk within society. It delves into themes of morality, justice, and the thin line between good and evil. The film's intricate plot keeps audiences engaged and guessing until the very end, with its twists and turns adding layers of complexity to the story. Seven's visual style is both gritty and stylish, with its somber color palette and atmospheric lighting reflecting the bleakness of the narrative. The production design effectively creates a world that feels lived-in and worn, further immersing viewers in the film's dark and grim atmosphere. The haunting and atmospheric score by Howard Shore adds an extra layer of tension and unease to the overall experience. In conclusion, Seven is a dark and gripping psychological thriller that showcases the mastery of director David Fincher. With its atmospheric cinematography, intricate storytelling, and outstanding performances, the film remains a standout in the genre. If you appreciate thought-provoking and unsettling narratives that push the boundaries of conventional crime thrillers, Seven is an absolute must-see. However, be prepared for its dark and disturbing themes, as the film ventures into deeply unsettling territory.

Another movie starring Brad Pitt and directed by David Fincher and I can say that I wasn’t disappointed. The concept and storyline were incredible and it will forever be one of the best crime movies I have ever watched, with it having an engaging plot, lots of action and ‘good’ murders. The movie was often tense constantly putting me on the edge of my seat which was achieved not only by the highly skilled acting, but also because of the music of Howard Shore who never fails to produce a soundtrack that reflects both the mood and style of a film. Both Pitt and Morgan Freeman portrayed their characters well, with it in my opinion being one of Freeman’s best roles. The gritty colour scheme helps to add to the tone of the movie, helping it to become one of the darkest yet cleverest crime thrillers I have ever watched. The plot, as I have already mentioned, is incredibly well written and I am looking forward to watching more films by the same director (David Fincher) since I have been very impressed with both this and Fight Club. Being both totally unsettling and totally gripping, I highly recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind seeing a lot of gore or a film with a deeply depressing finale as, to me, it is one of the best movies I have ever watched.

I don’t usually want to comment on movies, but I won’t feel happy if I don’t share my joy about this film. I absolutely love this movie. This movie was the first time I saw a movie made by David Fincher, I spent the whole night on Wikipedia browsing about every single person who impressed me in the film. I think this is probably Fincher’s best work so far. This movie is the most suspense-filled thriller I have ever watched. The performances of the cast are so chilling yet captivating that you would wonder what hit you after watching the movie. This is the GREAT MOVIE that you don’t want to miss watching.

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Seven Review

05 Jan 1996

126 minutes

Seven isn't just a movie, it's a mind fuck, a psychological trip through hell that leaves your head spinning, your heart pumping and your stomach crying out for the medicinal properties of a stiff whiskey, or five. Not since The Exorcist has there been a mainstream Hollywood studio movie as extraordinarily dark, bleak, intense, and as monumentally scary as this. From its sensory assaulting opening credits, through to its desolate and very shocking finale, Seven goes for the gut, and like an insidious gnawing in the pit of your stomach, it never lets up. Be warned, this is not comfortable viewing.

In an anonymous US city in which it always rains and nobody seems to have bothered to pay their electricity bill, a serial killer is busy slaying his victims according to the seven deadly sins: gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, etc, leaving a sick procession of corpses, each one murdered in a way related to their own particular sin: a wealthy defence lawyer is forced to cut off a pound of his own flesh (greed); an obese man is forced fed until his stomach explodes (gluttony); a prostitute (lust) is... well, best see for yourself. Assigned to the case are veteran cop William Somerset (Freeman), a methodical, world-weary thinker and a week away from retirement after 34 years on the force, and his hot-headed young new partner David Mills (Pitt), recently relocated, along with his wife (Paltrow), to this hellhole of a city, eager to make a name for himself. Try as they might they are always one step behind the murderer, but all too late his true motives are revealed to them.

Director David Fincher, who previously helmed the equally gloomy Alien3, creates an overwhelming sense of unease, presenting a world of irredeemable ugliness, a grim, melancholic, depressing, decaying society from which there is no escape. This movie even smells rank. But despite the gruesomeness of the crimes this is no slasher movie. In the same way that Manhunter relied on the psychological for its impact, so too does Seven. The victims are never killed onscreen. Instead, we catch glimpses of the corpses at the crime scene, or in the morgue, or in the snatches of black-and-white police photographs that are flashed before us. Perhaps more disturbingly, you are mostly left to visualise in your mind the full extent of the killer's atrocities when they are discussed, matter-of-factly, by Pitt and Freeman.

As the cops move closer to their foe (whose identity is revealed late and by then it doesn't really matter anyway since it's fundamentally irrelevant) the movie shifts from thriller territory into the realms of horror, and it's here that Fincher and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker pull off their greatest coup, a piece of cinematic genius - the most downbeat ending imaginable. Ever. You come away reeling, emotionally and mentally, shaken and most definitely stirred, muttering to yourself that they couldn't possibly have done that. But they did. Oh boy, did they. For the ending alone, this is simply unmissable.

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Common Sense Media Review

By Elliot Panek , based on child development research. How do we rate?

Grim, slick, shocking thriller. Older teens only.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this film contains graphic depictions of the aftermath of grisly murders involving the seven deadly sins. While none of this takes place on-screen, the vivid descriptions prove to be nearly as chilling. For example, an obese man is forced to eat until his stomach bursts. A man is forced to…

Why Age 17+?

The gory aftermath (and allusions to) horrific torture and murder. Gunshots. Off

Lots of swearing.

References to prostitution, sex.

Any Positive Content?

Though justice is said to be "worth fighting for," the world is so bleak and ful

Though Seven aims to show that all people are capable of great sin, Detective So

Violence & Scariness

The gory aftermath (and allusions to) horrific torture and murder. Gunshots. Off-screen murder. Rape.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Though justice is said to be "worth fighting for," the world is so bleak and full of horror that this doesn't seem believable.

Positive Role Models

Though Seven aims to show that all people are capable of great sin, Detective Somerset is level-headed, wise, and kind.

Parents need to know that this film contains graphic depictions of the aftermath of grisly murders involving the seven deadly sins. While none of this takes place on-screen, the vivid descriptions prove to be nearly as chilling. For example, an obese man is forced to eat until his stomach bursts. A man is forced to kill a prostitute by stabbing her reproductive organs with an 8-inch knife. A beauty queen's face is cut off. A lawyer must cut out his own stomach. A police officer's pregnant wife is beheaded. In the end, the line between good and evil is blurred, with evil more or less coming out on top. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (22)
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Based on 22 parent reviews

"What's in the box?!"

Become vengeance, david, become wrath., what's the story.

SEVEN combines horror and film noir genres, with overconfident rookie David Mills ( Brad Pitt ) as the doomed detective of the noir tradition, and book veteran William Somerset ( Morgan Freeman ) as the desexualized, pedantic survivor familiar to slasher movie fans. The story follows the archetypal pair as they wind their way through a dark world of urban violence in search of a serial killer ( Kevin Spacey ). Mills and Somerset conclude that each murder corresponds to one of the seven deadly sins from the Bible, and that the killer is trying to preach his message of religious morality through his murders and the press they receive. Even after being willfully apprehended, the killer has one final trick up his sleeve -- a horrific gesture designed to goad Mills into crossing the line between lawful justice and sinful vengeance.

Is It Any Good?

Dark, disturbing and occasionally gory, Seven is a psychological thriller that, along with Chinatown , is among the bleakest films in mainstream cinema history.

The murders are not shown on screen, but the film has a morbid fascination with the pain inflicted on the victims. And it depicts a dark universe, where the lines between good and evil are blurred. There's no question that it aims to be more philosophical than other detective/horror films (namely The Silence of the Lambs ). Attempts at deeper meaning might be pretentious or profound, depending on how serious you can take Brad Pitt as an actor.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about horror movies. How is this movie different than a slasher film? What makes it disturbing? Is it any less chilling because the violence is not shown on screen?

Movie Details

• In theaters : January 1, 1995
• On DVD or streaming : June 7, 2001
• Cast : Brad Pitt , Gwyneth Paltrow , Morgan Freeman
• Director : David Fincher
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : Warner Bros.
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 127 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : grisly afterviews of horrific and bizarre killings, and for strong language.
• Last updated : February 28, 2022

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What to watch next.

The Silence of the Lambs

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Seven (United States, 1995)

Frequently, mystery/thrillers present us with a cast of about six or seven characters, set up a sequence of grizzly murders, then "surprise" us by revealing which of those six or seven characters is the guilty party. It's a time-honored method that's repeated in at least several movies each year. At the outset, Seven has all the hallmarks of this kind of motion picture. Fortunately, it turns out somewhat smarter and less predictable. Though not without significant flaws, Seven isn't transparent or moronic, and it doesn't insult the average viewer's intelligence.

When all is said and done, the mystery of Seven is not who the killer is -- there's never any question about the identity -- but how he will outsmart the police next, and what he will do as a climax to his killing spree. It's refreshing to find an intelligent maniac who is not undone by a moment of sheer stupidity. From beginning to end, Seven 's murderer has the situation under control. The police are his pawns, not the other way around. Shades of Silence of the Lambs .

The good guys are a pair of detectives at opposite ends of their careers. David Mills (Brad Pitt) is new on the job, full of energy and high ideals, and ready to "make a difference" by catching the crooks. William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is in his last week on the job. His long years studying crime scenes and following up on clues have left him weary and jaded. To him, being a detective isn't about nabbing criminals -- it's about methodically collecting and cataloguing evidence in case a prosecutor ever needs it.

The serial killer pursued by Mills and Somerset is choosing each of his victims based on which of the seven deadly sins (gluttony, greed, sloth, lust, pride, envy, wrath) they have most clearly violated. The deaths form a portion of a decidedly warped sermon.. In their quest to end this bloody, sadistic spree, the two cops appear well-paired, as together they make the perfect detective. Mills is all brawn and little brain. Somerset, on the other hand, spends long hours in the library researching Dante and Chaucer, looking for clues that will enable him to prevent the next killing.

One of the problems with Seven is that Pitt's Mills is not an especially likable character. He's cocky and arrogant, with an inflated opinion of himself. Up until the end, he's convinced that his way is always the best. Pitt doesn't turn in one of his most impressive performances here, either. There's no subtlety whatsoever. In this film, the actor has a single mode: overdrive. Somerset, on the other hand, is a subdued and balanced personality perfectly essayed by Morgan Freeman. By emoting less than his co-star, Freeman frequently steals scenes from him. Gwyneth Paltrow ( Flesh and Bone, Jefferson in Paris ), one of today's better young actresses, is woefully underused in the role of Mills' wife, Tracy.

Seven is unnecessarily gory and runs for a little too long, but neither of these elements detracts much from the film's enjoyability (unless you have a weak stomach). The same is true of several logical flaws -- they're there, but not overly apparent while the film is on-screen (they can be ruminated about after the credits have rolled). While Seven lacks the cleverness of the superior Usual Suspects , it's strong enough to hold its own against most other thrillers. Seven may always be grim, dark, and rainy, but at least there's a little substance beneath the atmosphere.

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By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Seven is another crime story that leans heavily on atmosphere. But this nerve-jangling thriller, evocatively shot by Darius Khondji, is no period piece. Set in an unnamed modern city deluged by rain and eroded by decay, the film stars Brad Pitt as David Mills, a can-do detective just in from the sticks with his wife, Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), to replace Lt. William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), a soul-sick cop ready to pack it in after 34 years of chasing scumbags.

The case that brings the two together is a John Doe serial killer who bases his murders on the seven deadly sins. For gluttony, a fatso is forced to eat until he bursts. For pride, a model is brutally disfigured. And so on through greed, sloth and lust. Envy and wrath are paired up for a twisted, gut-wrenching climax.

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Andrew Kevin Walker wrote the script while working at Tower Records in Manhattan. But don’t take this skin crawler of a mood piece for pulp escapism. Pitt drops the movie star glamour as a stubbly hothead. Freeman, an actor of consummate subtlety, plays the cooler hand. They make a fine, fierce team. Only a dinner organized by Tracy (the gifted Paltrow is underused) takes the chill off the two cops. Later, Tracy confides in William why she’s afraid to tell her husband she’s pregnant. It’s a rare nod to sentiment. Humor is also scarce, though Pitt’s barely literate cop gets a big laugh when he pronounces the Marquis de Sade as “Shar-day.”

Seven wants to abrade, not ingratiate. Director David Fincher got hammered for turning Alien 3 , his feature debut, from a monster mash into an AIDS parable. That’s what happens when you aim high in Hollywood: You’re labeled pretentious. Fincher is not entirely blameless. Characters are sometimes merely attitudes posing as people. And the request that critics refrain from revealing who plays John Doe (OK, I won’t tell, but it’s a superactor, not a superstar) smacks of gimmickry. It’s not the identity of the killer that gives Seven its kick — it’s the way Fincher raises mystery to the level of moral provocation. If Pulp Fiction has given us a taste for such challenge, then we have Tarantino to thank instead of blame.

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FILM REVIEW

FILM REVIEW; A Sickening Catalogue of Sins, Every One of Them Deadly

By Janet Maslin

• Sept. 22, 1995

In "Seven," a grim urban environment is rocked by horrible murders, each more gruesome than the last and each with strong ties to the local library. It seems that the killer, showily conversant with Dante, Milton, Chaucer and no doubt Agatha Christie, has devised an orderly string of crimes that deliver a collective message. Each one interprets a deadly sin in terms that smack of Hannibal Lecter. Pride: A beautiful model is butchered, with her nose cut off to spite her face. Et cetera.

In case these crimes, however disgustingly rendered, are not formulaic enough, "Seven" also throws in two familiar detective types: the brash new guy (Brad Pitt), and the steady-handed veteran who is on the verge of leaving the force (Morgan Freeman). The new guy has a loving, patient wife (Gwyneth Paltrow), and so the film treats her in ways you wouldn't treat a dog. As for the veteran, if you guess that he has only one week to go before retirement, naturally you're right.

Although the director, David Fincher (with a strong track record in rock video), and the screenwriter, Andrew Kevin Walker (inspired to write "Seven" while working as a clerk at Tower Records), borrow so many familiar elements for their story, they seem determined to give it an uncommonly nasty spin. So the crime scenes are rendered in sickening detail, and the whole film has a murky, madly pretentious tone. Visually, the effect is that of spending a long time looking at a bowl of oatmeal on a rainy day. Only during its last scenes does the film brighten, partly because of the actor who is revealed as the killer and partly because the action finally moves outdoors in broad daylight.

Mr. Freeman moves sagely through "Seven" with the air of one who has seen it all and will surely be seeing something better very soon. His performance has just the kind of polish and self-possession that his co-star, Mr. Pitt, seems determined to avoid. Demonstrating an eighth sin by frittering away an enormously promising career, Mr. Pitt walks through this film looking rumpled and nonchalant, mumbling his lines with hip diffidence to spare. He remains too detached to show much enthusiasm, except for times when the screenplay begins moralizing about what a sick world we live in. Films like this one and, say, "Kalifornia" aren't making it any better.

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'Se7en' Revisited: The Films of David Fincher

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Where as Alien3 has been forgotten thanks to ignominy, the shadow of the first two Alien movies, and its botched production, Se7en has persevered for almost twenty years if for no other reason than what's in the fucking box.  Se7en is where David Fincher 's filmography truly begins, and it's fitting that a director who self-identifies as cynical should lead with a movie that abhors human nature, massacres the good in more ways than one, and even feels slight reverence towards its heinous killer.  There's a beauty to the cruelty as the movie presents a stylized realism that taps into a rotting, fetid world but does so without establishing a particular locale, drenching the unnamed city in rain, and sinking the shots into darkness and low angles.

Se7en is where David Fincher finally got to come out and play.  Alien 3 was a trap that became a prison and eventually he just had to flee from the depressing hellhole of that production.  He returned to music videos thinking he would never make another movie again, and when Se7en came along, he went all in on a "meditation on evil and how evil gets on you and you can't get it off."   Fincher didn't return with an open palm.  He came back with a clenched fist.

We don't meet John Doe ( Kevin Spacey ) until almost the end of the movie, but Fincher brings us right inside his mind with the opening credits.  The cold open is but a somber prologue to the evil we're about to witness, and yet there's an artfulness to Doe's technique.  In the commentary track, Fincher argues that Doe has "more enthusiasm, than technique," but I beg to differ. Somerset ( Morgan Freeman ) agrees that something like keeping the Sloth victim alive for a year takes incredible will, but it can't be done without technique.  Doe is certainly zealous, but he's also precise, exacting, and almost completely uncompromising unless backed into a corner, at which point he still makes it work to his advantage.  Let me know if this description reminds you of anyone.

Part of what makes Se7en timeless isn't just the subject matter or the famous twist.  It's because Fincher managed to balance the real with the stylized.  For all the ugliness in our world, there is no place as persistently bad as the unnamed city because it's unhooked from time and space.  Somerset works on a typewriter, but other detectives in the precinct use computers.  There are no pop-culture references, advertisements, or any other notifications of era beyond a subdued tone that lets us know we're in the mid-90s, but it's not a 90s film beyond the fact that it probably couldn't get made in today's all-or-nothing studio model.  Compare this to Zodiac where we're firmly in the 1970s, but as Fincher points out in his commentary on Se7en , "sin is not modern."  It's timeless.

Despite the pervasive ugliness of the unnamed city, Fincher doesn't make it appealing from start to finish.  The crimes are undoubtedly grotesque, but Somerset and Mills ( Brad Pitt ) aren't deeply damaged people.  In the cold open, Somerset—who knows he can't stick around any longer—still cares whether or not a child saw a gruesome murder.  Mills and Tracy ( Gwyneth Paltrow ) are an idyllic couple who have wandered into the netherworld.  They're high-school sweethearts, Mills took the job because he "thought he could do some good," and some of his ties are surprisingly goofy given his profession.  The young couple even believed they weren't going to get scammed into an apartment where a train rides by; a little bit of sinister symbolism as the city outside shakes the foundations of their home.

The positivity in these relationships is obviously a necessary lifeboat, otherwise we would drown in the perverse surroundings despite the seductive cinematography and design.  Se7en is a delightful study in contrasts as Fincher plunges deep into the recesses of an ugly world made even uglier by John Doe's crimes, and yet there's a meticulous care in the setting.  The only time Fincher goes handheld is when he's forced to do so in the foot chase with Mills and Doe.  Even when the SWAT team is storming the Sloth victim's home, Fincher keeps it steady, which is a particularly nice trick when you consider the control of the scene is absolutely uprooted by the fact that the Sloth victim is still "alive".

John Doe is, for all of his madness, also an artist, and Fincher has a disturbing respect for that.  It wasn't enough to simply tie up the Sloth victim or make the Greed victim cut out a piece of flesh.  The Gluttony victim is all execution.  He feeds the fat man until he bursts.  But the Greed victim is given a scale; the Sloth victim's apartment is filled with pine tree air fresheners; the Pride victim has the sin description written across her vanity photo; and the lust victim—we don't even see it because it's too grotesque to even enter the room.  Clearly, these touches are part of John Doe's expression beyond just writing the sin, and therefore it's more effective both to his audience and the film's.  But Fincher doesn't disrupt it.  The handheld scene is the sole disruption partially by necessity, but it's also the only time things don't go according to John Doe's plan.

And let's be fair: it's the elaborate plan that can only happen in a movie, and not just because of the extravagant crime scenes.  John Doe needs the detectives for the culmination of his plan, but he hides the very first clue behind a refrigerator and hopes that there's a cop clever enough to figure out that the floor shavings would lead to that clue.  He would also need to make sure that the Greed victim's widow noticed the painting was upside down, which would lead to forensics dusting the wall for fingerprints.  Additionally, his plan is flexible enough that he can speed up his timetable after confronting Mills and Somerset and trying to kill them in the hallway.  We can fill in excuses, but the tightness of the script does leave these flaws a bit glaring, although none of them derail the movie because we've been trained to accept movie serial killer logic, and the film isn't really about the particulars of his plan as much as what that plan means.

There are seven deadly sins, but there are also seven cardinal virtues: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility.  The movie never mentions these because virtue is in short supply.  It's not that he world of Se7en is showing us all the sins that Doe sees on a daily basis, or even that Doe is right.  His issue is with the casualness of which we accept sin, and virtue is therefore meaningless.

Accounting for the sins, Doe clearly represents "Wrath".  It's the only way to kill and torture others, but instead, Doe assigns that sin to Mills.  Furthermore, Mills must "become" Wrath.  It's a transference representing the film's ultimate statement on the pervasiveness of sin.  A man who came to "do some good" is faced with a decision to kill someone who is clearly evil, but he's not killing Doe because he's evil.  He's killing him as an act of pure vengeance, and a vengeance the audience can sympathize with.

Rather than accept "Wrath" as his own sin, Doe casually takes "envy", and it's almost because there's nothing left.  He envies the life of a normal man, and Spacey says it with a sigh.  It's just another sin in a world filled with them.  It's the casual sin John Doe witnessed every day, and now he takes it upon himself as if it were just a sad inevitability.  This is in contrast to Mills, whose very soul is faced with an impossible choice.

So I have to admit I feel some consternation when it all comes back to "What's in the fucking box," when there's so much more outside of it.  The box has become so pervasive that people misremember it.  Talking to The Guardian , Fincher angrily rejected that Se7en started "torture porn", and noted that he "almost had a fist-fight with a woman at a Beverly Hills cocktail party because she said 'There is no need to make a stand in of Gwyneth Paltrow's head to find in the box.  You don't need to see that.' And I said, 'Well, we didn't.' And she said, 'Oh yes, you did.'

What people are really recalling is the gutsiness of the ending.  They saw a movie that was deep, dark, and disturbing, and they needed some light.  Some probably felt entitled to it.  But what attracted Fincher to the project was the exact opposite.  As he explained to the Guardian :

So this script was floating around and my agent, who's very sweet and always very hopeful, said, "You know, New Line is interested in this. You might like this, and they might want to make it with you, so maybe you should read it." So I read it, and got to the end, with the head in the box, and I called him and said, "This is fantastic, this is so great because I had thought it was a police procedural; now it's this meditation on evil and how evil gets on you and you can't get it off." And he said, "What are you talking about?" And I talked about the whole head-in-the-box thing, she's been dead for hours and there's no bullshit chase across town and the guy driving on sidewalks to get to the woman, who's drawing a bath while the serial killer sneaks in the back window. And he goes, "Oh, they sent you the wrong draft." [audience laughs] And he sent me the right draft, and there was a guy driving across town on sidewalks, serial killer sneaking in the back window.

The Se7en we got was basically because Fincher and producer Mike De Luca were sneaky and clever.  This time, Fincher had circumvented the people who had hamstrung him on Alien3 .  The lesson from Alien 3 was that " it's always going to be your fault " so why not take full credit whether people go for it or not?  Alien 3 is a disaster and it's arguably the most important movie in Fincher's development as a director.  If he played the game on that movie and the production ran fine and the movie was a modest success, the lesson could have been you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.  Instead, Fincher learned you catch more flies with a fucking bug zapper, and that if you're not going to do it your way and to the best of your ability, then there's no point in making it.  You can see that as recently as him walking away from the Steve Jobs movie .  If it's not going to be daring, uncomfortable, and "scar", then it's not worth making.

The ending does make the movie more than a police procedural, but it's only the culmination of what came before.  To be honest, I don't know another way the movie can end because it would be in such stark contrast to all the other disturbing scenes.  How can you give a happy ending to a movie where you have Leland Orser 's character freaking out in the interrogation room (a scene that creeps me out every single time)? Granted, those scenes are disturbing in part because of how they're shot and constructed, but this notion of a last-minute foot chase to stop the killer is meant to satisfy the audience, and let them believe there's some kind of karmic justice in place if you can just outrun your brilliant antagonist.

It's hopeful, but it's not real as it pertains to what came before.  It's true that on a surface level, Se7en isn't real either.  It's the soul of the movie that's real because not everything John Doe says is necessarily wrong.  It's very disturbing when you think, "I don't agree with this lunatic, but I see his point."  The reality of Se7en is in the sins and how they don't stay in a neat little box where a detective solves a case and the sin goes away.

Here's how Fincher puts it on the commentary track:

I look at Se7en and I see something that was trying to be very realistic.  It may be incredibly stylized but it was always in the tension.  The thing that was forefront of my mind: how to make it rotting and how to make it real.

Se7en was the success David Fincher needed to begin his film career in earnest, but his follow-up was oddly more concerned with filmmaking than storytelling.

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MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Seven’ Offers a Punishing Look at Some Deadly Sins

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Noticeable skill has gone into the making of “Seven,” but it’s hard to take much pleasure in that. The story of two cops on the trail of a terrifying serial killer, “Seven” is most notable for how lovingly it lingers on the grotesque and repulsive details of the man’s sadistic crimes. If movies were rated by how many showers are needed before viewers can feel human again, this picture would go off the chart.

The creative team behind “Seven”--specifically director David Fincher, screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker and cinematographer Darius Khondji--would probably consider that last remark a compliment. Certainly they’ve expended great effort toward making “Seven” as creepy and distasteful an experience as they could. It’s nice to have goals, fellas, but the truth is even sadism can be overdone.

The film’s initial plot mechanism is a good one. Lurking in an unnamed major city is a brilliant but twisted individual determined to commit a series of murders based on the seven deadly sins, to turn the sin against the sinner in some kind of demented teaching tool to redeem humanity.

Want examples? You’ll be sorry you asked. In murder one, a hugely fat individual is forced at gunpoint to eat more and more until his stomach bursts as a lesson against gluttony. In the second, a high-powered criminal attorney is required to cut a pound of flesh off his own body to illustrate the perils of greed. All of which is shown, via crime scene photos and caring close-ups of the victims, in unapologetically grotesque detail.

Thrown together to investigate this unholy mess are two detectives who are the inevitable polar opposites, partners with nothing in common except this increasingly lurid crime. Lt. William Somerset is a meticulous perfectionist, a veteran of 34 years on the force who has only one week left before retirement. As a soul-weary lone wolf who views police work as a cerebral exercise, Morgan Freeman is exceptional, giving a performance capable of holding this picture together during its periodic attempts at self-destruction.

Newly arrived in town is Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt), a cocky, motor-mouthed slob who’d rather kick down a door than knock on it. “Seven” does so poorly by this character, turning him into a fatuous, stereotypical dolt, that Pitt’s usually effective presence is wasted.

Faring even worse is the talented Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Mills’ pure-of-heart wife, Tracy, a saintly personage whose presence in the picture is such a flimsy contrivance it’s amazing any actress agreed to play it.

Feeble contrivance turns out to be one of “Seven’s” deadly sins. Key plot points are not always believable, and a great many of the film’s twists are visible a considerable way down the road. When you add a level of pretension that indicates somebody believed this picture had profound things to say about the human condition, the results are regrettable.

What keeps “Seven” alive, aside from Morgan Freeman’s performance, is the film’s visual strength. A specialist in commercials and music videos who made his feature debut with “Alien 3” director Fincher is someone who believes looks can kill. Working with cinematographer Khondji (“Delicatessen”), Fincher has used all manner of visual flourishes, including an unusual film developing process to ensure that no shot in the picture is an average one.

Regrettably, all this expertise, including an ability to create apartments so roach-ridden and rundown you can practically smell the decay, has been put in the service of what is basically a detailed viewing of the gruesome workings of a perverse mind. “Seven” does not seem like anyone’s idea of entertainment, but public executions drew big crowds in their day and there is little reason to believe that human nature has gotten any more refined and elegant in the interim.

* MPAA rating: R, for grisly after-views of horrific and bizarre killings, and for strong language. Times guidelines: the equivalent of a forced tour of a morgue.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Brad Pitt: Mills

Morgan Freeman: Somerset

Gwyneth Paltrow: Tracy

Richard Roundtree: Talbot

R. Lee Ermey: Police Captain

An Arnold Kopelson production, released by New Line Cinema. Director David Fincher. Producers Arnold Kopelson, Phyllis Carlyle. Executive producers Gianni Nunnari, Dan Kolsrud, Anne Kopelson. Screenplay Andrew Kevin Walker. Cinematographer Darius Khondji. Editor Richard Francis-Bruce. Costumes Michael Kaplan. Music Howard Shore. Production design Arthur Max. Art director Gary Wissner. Set decorator Clay A. Griffith. Running time: 2 hours, 7 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.

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For ‘Seven’ Restoration, David Fincher Went Back and ‘Kissed in Some of the City’

Bill desowitz.

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David Fincher is a philosopher as well as a perfectionist. When asked about the significance of his 8K remastering of “Seven” (premiering April 19 at the Chinese IMAX in 4K as part of the TCM Classic Film Festival) , he told IndieWire, “If you think of it in string theory, it’s like a volumetric capture of where all these careers were at, and what these people wanted and needed and infused the thing with.”

“It is what it is, warts and all,” Fincher said. “And some of it is spectacular and some of it is stuff that I would change or fix today, but I didn’t want to mess with that. There’s a lot of imperfections, there’s a lot of things that you just don’t see on film. When people say they love the look of film, what they’re talking about is chaos, entropy, and softness. Now, of course, we live in an HDR world where you get those kinds of very deep, rich, velvety blacks for free.

“And we had to negotiate that fine line between what to fix or not,” Fincher continued. “So we attempted to go back in and fix to make it match. And kind of repaint stuff and just take out water spots and little edge flashes. And some of it is impossible to get it to match, certainly by today’s standards. So there was a lot of excavation. I didn’t realize it would take as long as it did, at least six months dealing with files and making notes, and maybe the last nine months to a year putting some of it on the back burner while we finished ‘The Killer’ and did initial work on ‘Panic Room,’ which is what we’re working on now.”

“Seven” was filmed in downtown L.A., mostly in the rain, by cinematographer Darius Khondji . He shot in Super 35 with Panavision cameras and Primo spherical lenses in 2.39. He used a combination of Steadicam and hand-held shots, creating a modern yet scary aesthetic in consultation with Fincher. For interiors, he utilized toplighting and Chinese lanterns for a soft, gritty, moist look.

“Darius Khondji used to change film stocks in the middle of the scene, depending on how contrasty he wanted the coverage to be,” Fincher added. “And it all kind of mushed together in the world of Kodak and Deluxe. And he had a 35mm hand-held camera for a lot of the chase stuff, which was very effective…but it was a film scratcher and film shredder.” Now that’s been fixed to create more consistency.

Back in 1995, it was also completely acceptable to have a window that was de-maxed and became a soft light for the scene or to have background cityscapes with rushed matte paintings in windows. But Fincher claimed that unfinished work wouldn’t fly today, so they had to “go back in and kiss in some of the city.”

In fact, the lack of visual control that Fincher displayed on “Seven” was responsible for his current reputation as a perfectionist. “One of the things that stands out in the way David makes his movies today is that he spends a lot of time working on and perfecting camera movement,” Mavromates explained. “And this is something that he could not do with ‘Seven’ back then. So what you see here sometimes is some of those little bumps in camera moves that are in the original movie are now gone.”

Then there was the annoying flyaway hair that suddenly appeared on Paltrow’s face during that intimate diner scene with Freeman. “You couldn’t even see in the film version that it cuts right through Gwyneth’s eye,” Fincher said. “And I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in 1080p. But in 4K you can definitely see it, and we had to take that thing out because it was too distracting.”

Mavromates worked with IMAX on the conversion of “Seven” to make it look good on their enormous screen. However, Fincher insisted on keeping the film’s original 2.39 aspect ratio rather than conforming to IMAX’s taller framing. The director and Mavromates also decided to skip IMAX’s grain management system since they had already run “Seven” through their own, and IMAX agreed that it was unnecessary.

Overall, though, the director admitted that he hasn’t revisited “Seven” in a very long time: “I mean, some stuff snuck up on me,” he said. “There were definitely moments that these were different creatures back then. I can’t imagine the movie without Morgan.”

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Se7en (Seven) Ending Explained – So what was in the box? And how did the studio almost change the iconic ending?

Se7en Plot Synopsis

Written by David Fincher, Se7en is a simple but bleak crime thriller, centering on two detectives – a rookie and a veteran – who work together to hunt a serial killer. This killer is using the seven deadly sins as his motives, going after those he deems need to be treated a lesson.

Unfortunately, this brilliant mastermind has his own ideas on how to end this deadly game, and as Mills and Somerset dive deeper into the truth, they soon realize that this could well involve both their lives.

What secret is Tracy keeping from her husband?

The story begins with soon-to-retire Detective Lieutenant William Somerset teaming up with idealistic detective, David Mills. He’s just moved there with his wife Tracy, who happens to be pregnant. Only, she hasn’t actually told her husband yet but does confide in Somerset, whom she grows closer to.

The pair have similar ideas about the town she’s moved to, with Somerset sympathizing with her plight. However, he does tell her to inform Mills if she plans to keep the child.

How do the murders begin?

The first crime scene we’re introduced to is absolutely grim and it’s such an iconic scene that avid film-goers will recognize it from the cinema shot in 2003’s The Butterfly Effect.

Anyway, the pair arrive at a rank kitchen where an obese man has been forced to eat until his stomach bursts. His ankles and wrists are bound while a bucket under the table is full of vomit. The coroner actually deduces that this could have gone on for more than 12 hours. And this first murder is based around the sin of Gluttony.

Another victim soon shows in the form of a criminal defense attorney, who’s killed after being forced to cut a pound of flesh from himself, representing greed. Clues at both murder scenes lead the pair to a suspect’s apartment – where they find a third victim.

This man happens to be a drug dealer and child molester, representing sloth. The thing is, this third victim is actually still alive. He’s in critical condition though and unable to answer any of Somerset and Mills’ questions.

The pair of detectives do find daily photographs of the victim, taken over a year, which reinforces that these crimes had been planned in advance.

Who is the murderer?

Somerset and Mills use library records to identity a John Doe and track him to his apartment. He seems to be the right guy too, and as Mills gives chase, he falls and injures his arm.

Unfortunately, he’s also struck in the head with a tire iron before having a gun placed to his head. The killer doesn’t shoot though, given we know he’s instrumental to Doe’s plans later on in the film.

For now, Doe scurries away but in doing so, Somerset and Mills find a litany of clues in the apartment, including hundreds of notebook that reveal Doe’s psychopathy and how dangerous he actually is.

Somerset and Mills are too late to stop the next murder – representing lust-  where a man is forced to rape a prostitute with a bladed strap-on. If that wasn’t enough, the fifth victim happens to be a model mutilated by Doe himself. She was given the choice of calling for help and living disfigured or committing suicide by taking pills. In choosing the latter option, Doe set this up to represent Pride.

Why does Doe turn himself in?

As the film progresses, Somerset and Mills are caught off-guard by Doe turning himself in to police, covered in the blood of an unidentified victim. He offers to confess his crime on one condition – Mills and Somerset drive him to a secret location where the victims of Envy and Wrath are buried. If not, then he’ll plead insanity.

Somerset is wary but feisty Mills agrees to his terms. As they drive together, Doe isn’t remorseful for his crimes, and matter-of-factly declares that his victims deserved to die. He likens himself to a martyr, someone chosen by a higher power to shock the world out of apathy.

There are some lovely foreshadowed moments here too, with Doe making threatening remarks toward Mills, which becomes more obvious as the film gears up for its final act. For now though, Mills just thinks Doe is insane.

What happens during the climax of the movie?

Eventually the trio make it to a remote, deserted area. Minutes after their arrival, a delivery van approaches. Mills holds Doe at gunpoint while Somerset is given a box by the driver, instructed by Doe to bring that to this location for “a guy called David.”

Somerset opens the box… and immediately tells Mills to stay back. This is the final game, as Doe reveals that he himself is the representation of Envy. He’s been jealous of Mills’ life with Tracy and that’s what’s driven him to conduct the next stage of his dastardly plan.

What’s in the box?

Se7en ends with a devastating big reveal, as it turns out Doe has decapitated Mills’ pregnant wife and her severed head is what’s in the box.

With Mills distraught and overcome with grief, Doe taunts him further, revealing that Tracy was pregnant. Doe is sickeningly delighted to learn Mills had no knowledge of this and urges Mills to kill him.

Somerset tries in vain to stop him but it’s no good. Mills shoots Doe, carrying out his master plan.

In shooting Doe so brutally, Mills unwittingly falls into the killer’s trap, as he becomes the seventh and final sin – Wrath. Police show up and arrest him, with Somerset gravely retorting that he’ll be “around.”

It’s a really bleak ending and interestingly, not what the studio originally wanted.

What were the alternate endings to Se7en?

We’ve all seen examples of studio interference absolutely butchering a movie and its original screenplay. Seven was almost changed radically from the ending we received.

The ending was actually re-written several times as the studio was uncomfortable with the bleakness of the conclusion to the movie and wanted to soften it up.

In one version, additional scenes see Somerset intervene with a switchblade before Mills can shoot Doe. Mills shoots Somerset in the shoulder, and then kills Doe. In this version, the scene resumes several weeks later with Mills sending a letter to Somerset prior to his appearance in court, telling him “you were right.”

Another that the studio were keen on involve Doe not killing Tracy and holding her up at gunpoint instead, sending both detectives on a race against time to save her life. Funnily enough, the main cast and director threatened to walk away from the project if the original ending was not agreed to.

The actual ending we receive is iconic because of this very bleakness and an excellent detective thriller almost ended up becoming generic studio fodder. Thank goodness we received the ending that we did!

Thanks for reading our Ending Explained article! What did you think of the ending? Have we missed anything? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Feel Free To Check Out More Movie Reviews Here!

7 thoughts on “se7en (seven) ending explained – so what was in the box and how did the studio almost change the iconic ending”.

The end is a not right and not logic even he is devil and serial killer

In regards to why the wife is killed when she seems “innocent” or order for mills to be “wrath” is a good thought. But maybe the writers were playing off the many times in the bible where god kills innocents to punish the wicked. Like the first born sons killed by the angel of death in egypt

The sin of envy was Does’. He was envious of Mills life with his wife. That’s why he killed her, she was the object of his envy . He couldn’t kill Mills because Mills was going to be his wrath.

He wasn’t in prison when he killed her (when she was killed). It was her blood Doe had on him when he turned himself in. He killed her before he turned himself in. He mailed the box before he turned himself in.

while the scene is excellent, I don’t get why he uses Mill’s wife who is not a sinner to commit the sin of envy, I don’t specifically believe he was envious of Mill’s life, and Mills living while being wrath does no make sense to me.

He arrived at the police station covered in blood. He had already done the deed.

How come john doe could kill Mills’ wife while he was in the prison?

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What’s in the Box?: The Terrifying Truth of ‘Se7en’

David Fincher’s horrifying breakthrough continues to scare us. In an excerpt from a new book about the director’s work, open the box and see what evil lurks in the hearts of man.

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“Wanting people to listen,” says John Doe (Kevin Spacey) to Detectives Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and Mills (Brad Pitt), “you can’t just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer. And then you’ll notice you’ve got their strict attention.”

The idea of a movie directed with a sledgehammer conjures up a bludgeoning clumsiness, or maybe accidental expressionism. Observing the Jackson Pollock–like splatter of another senseless murder at the beginning of Se7en , William Somerset sighs, “Look at all that passion all over the wall.” From there unfolds a series of precise strokes—its pace as finely calibrated as the metronome in Somserset’s study, its shocks as carefully curated as a museum retrospective. In this gallery analogy, there is a didactic aspect to an artist using excess as a tool of communication, and a real–world precedent for such pummelling innovations as the ones used by John Doe. In 1971, the American artist Chris Burden, whose oeuvre included shutting himself inside a locker for five days and crucifying himself to a Volkswagen Beetle, arranged for a friend to fire a bullet from a small-caliber rifle into his arm as part of a performance piece titled Shoot. “In this instant,” Burden reflected later, “I was a sculpture.”

Ever the vanguard artiste , John Doe adapts Burden’s gambit while interrogating its mixture of self-aggrandizement and self-endangerment—the frisson that occurs when art is remodeled into a life or death venture. Burden made his mark without resorting to full-on martyrdom; as a self-styled fin-de-siècle aesthete jointly projecting his superiority and self-loathing onto the world around him, John Doe goes further. He has to, because he’s on the margins of a marketplace oversaturated with morbid images and ideas. In order to make an impact, he must swing for the fences.

Se7en embodies and interrogates such blunt-force strategies, enfolding a meditation on—and enactment of—avant-garde artistry in genre-movie packaging. The film’s outer shape is that of a thriller, specifically the kind of gritty, big-city police procedural patented in the sweltering ’70s by Sidney Lumet: preparing for his first day on the job, David Mills (Brad Pitt) jokingly tells his wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), “Serpico’s got to go to work.” (“You might want to get rid of this little crusty in your eye, Serpico,” she responds sleepily). More significantly, Se7en erects itself as a landmark in the history of serial-killer movies. The genre began in earnest in 1931 with Fritz Lang’s M , whose guilt-wracked pederast is played by Peter Lorre as a mewling victim of his own insatiable compulsions, as well as a broken byproduct of early 20th-century modernity. Playing a man whose need to harm others reflects his own sense of victimization (“who knows what it’s like to be me?”) the actor is unforgettable, but the film’s other star is the steel and glass labyrinth of Weimar-era Berlin, which provides Lorre’s squirrelly Hans Beckert with an endless array of hiding places from cop and fellow criminal alike.

Lorre’s anguish at the end of M would be revisited and deepened by Anthony Perkins in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Carl Boehm in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) , twin masterpieces which, in their respective ways—elliptically in Hitchcock; allegorically in Powell—equated murderous psychosis with voyeurism, if not cinephilia itself. Psycho ’s staccato editing rhythms slashed, viscerally and subliminally, through both the fraying barriers of Hays Code censorship and spectatorial defense mechanisms, presaging a healthy cycle of serial-killer films in the 1970s—an era in which the popularization of psychopathology became a multi-platform growth industry encompassing both “true crime” fiction and grindhouse cinema. The eerie proximity to Hollywood of Charles Manson and the thinly veiled depiction of San Francisco’s Zodiac Killer in Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971) — which picked up Lang’s vision of the city-as-labyrinth and ran with it through winding streets—were key markers in this development, as were faux-naturalistic shockers like Wes Craven’s Mansonian The Last House on the Left (1973) and the best-selling novels of Thomas Harris; 1981’s Red Dragon filtered authentic Quantico protocol through allusions to William Blake and Guignol grander than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Taking off from Harris’s Gothic potboiler formula while blending in phantasmagorical social satire, Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial 1991 novel American Psycho , about a Wall Street power broker nursing a secret identity as a serial killer, brought the genre to a bleeding edge; that same year, Jonathan Demme’s film The Silence of the Lambs , a Harris adaption featuring Anthony Hopkins on irresistible form as Hannibal Lecter—in whose immaculate personage Norman Bates and his exposition-dispensing psychiatrist were humorously and horrifyingly combined—won five Academy Awards. Both of these pop-cultural conversation pieces fed indirectly into the creation of Se7en , a risky $30 million bet by the ever-hip production outfit New Line Cinema (known as “The House That Freddy Built” thanks to A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984]) against serial-killer fatigue. The film opened in the fall of 1995 with a cryptic ad campaign and minimal hype and grossed over $300 million worldwide, emerging as an oddly paradoxical crowd-pleaser: the sort of movie your friends urged you to see and warned you against in the same breath.

As with American Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs , Se7en draws its strength from a set of well-established conventions while also distancing itself from them. It does this mostly via the toxic potency of its visual style, which strips the rust off of the script’s cop movie tropes and exposes their gleaming bones. Meanwhile, the serial-killer material, which is so self-consciously lurid as to threaten unintentional comedy, is elevated, if not consecrated, by the story’s central gimmick: a suite of murders inspired by the seven deadly sins, carried out consecutively by John Doe as a sermon wherein Old Testament messaging is etched on the bodies of his victims and conveyed to the masses by a sensation-hungry media establishment playing into his game.

As high concepts go, Se7en ’s is dizzyingly vertiginous—which is to say pretentious, a quality the film owns straight-up. It’s a conceit most poetically expressed by the set-piece in the silent, church-like library whose cavernous expanse is illuminated by a set of golden-hued desk lamps—a place of refuge and literary worship containing the wisdom of the ages. “All these books,” Detective Somerset sighs admiringly to the security guards while wandering the stacks to the strains of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major. “A world of knowledge at your fingertips ... and you play cards.” Just as Se7en ’s gore attempts to outstrip its predecessors, the film’s omnipresent intellectualism exceeds the po-faced Freudian slippage of Psycho or the Lacanian quid pro quo of The Silence of the Lamb ; the film is pure pulp, but its gristle comes fully marinated in a thick stew of scriptural and liturgical references.

Anachronisms and artifacts are embedded in Se7en ’s aesthetic. One potentially illuminating way to look at the film is as a kind of contemporary “cabinet of curiosities,” or wunderkammer , a Medieval invention housing a set of disparate, exotic objects like a miniaturized museum. Se7en ’s first wunderkammer moment comes during its opening credit sequence, conceived by designer Kyle Cooper as a hallucinatory collage (shot specially by Harris Savides) conveying John Doe’s abject worldview and artisanal process through shots of scribbled prose and stitched together notebooks. The unsettling bits of handwritten text and grotesque medical-textbook-style photographs get hammered into place by the industrial beats of Nine Inch Nails, whose 1994 album The Downward Spiral anticipated and heralded Se7en ’s extremity (in the same year, Pearl Jam styled the liner notes of their hit record Vitalogy as a faux and grotesque medical textbook cataloguing a set of human abnormalities).

Se7en ’s wunderkammer motif is literalized later on during a tracking shot along a shelf in John Doe’s apartment that displays trophies from his victims. Beyond serving as a concise recap of the film’s story line thus far, the shot links motifs of obsessive sadism, eccentric collectorship, and outsider artistry. A row of symmetrically arranged tomato sauce cans nods comically toward Andy Warhol, but also, more generally, the mix of conceptual rigor and corporeal horror suggests an atrocity exhibition co-signed by Ed Gein and Damien Hirst, in whose distinctive disciplines and artistic traditions Se7en ’s bad guy could be said to operate. As a result, John Doe’s sledgehammer analogy, including that cloying acknowledgement of feeling the need to be heard—dial M for murder—scan as a weaponized sotto voce aside on behalf of its director, halfway between a brag and an ironic plea for clemency. Whatever else you can say about Se7en , it is not a tap on the shoulder; whatever ambivalences or contradictions David Fincher cultivates in his second feature, he gets, and keeps, our strict attention.

“A Sickening Catalogue of Sins, Every One of Them Deadly,” screamed the header to Janet Maslin’s review of Se7en in The New York Times , evoking the lurid tabloid covers strewn throughout Fincher’s film—grotty dispatches chronicling a killing spree in a large, unnamed American city. “Why here—why this place ?” queries Somerset of his new partner Mills upon their first meeting; Freeman places such an emphasis of disgust on those final two words that they gesture at some larger, collective understanding of hell-on-earth. Maslin’s description of Se7en ’s “grim urban environment” understates the extent to which Arthur Max’s borderline-dystopian production design sets and maintains the film’s tone, while her ultimate appraisal of the film as “dull” intersects interestingly and contrastingly with John Doe’s wink-nudge explanation of his (and Fincher’s) shock-to-the-system methodology. “Not even bags of body parts, a bitten-off tongue or a man being forced to cut off a pound of his own flesh (think ‘The Merchant of Venice’),” writes Maslin, “keep [ Se7en ] from being dull.” Her inventory is a few corpses short: the critic might have added to her list an obese shut-in fatally force-fed spaghetti; a woman penetrated with a weaponized leather-shop strap-on; myriad self-inflicted disfigurements; and a decapitated scion of Hollywood royalty—a sleight-of-head magic trick that serves as Se7en ’s missing piece-de-resistance.

Most of the initial dissent against Se7en —Maslin’s review included—was rooted in the old shibboleth of style over substance. What the film’s supporters saw, though, was an act of transubstantiation in which one became the other. “What I’ve done is going to be puzzled over, studied, and followed,” promises John Doe to his pursuers, and indeed, time has conferred a mostly rapturous critical consensus on Se7en highlighted by Richard Dyer’s 2008 BFI Classics monograph, which distributes its author’s analysis under a septet of alliterative chapter headings encompassing “sin,” “story,” “structure,” “seriality,” “sound,” “sight,” and “salvation.” Dyer takes Se7en seriously while still allowing for its gallows humor, and it is a funny movie, especially the running joke of Mills feeling double-teamed by Somerset’s high-minded condescension and John Doe’s intellectual preening while he struggles through Cliff’s Notes. “Fucker’s got a library card, doesn’t make him Yoda,” the cop snarls, consolidating his anti-intellectualism under the sign of Star Wars. His quip also points at Se7en ’s most provocative and problematic aspect: the veneration of its serial-killer figure as a modern guru with something to say about society. That this potential sticking point is completely indivisible from the things that make Se7en powerful is a good place to begin considering the question of Fincher’s transformative directorial presence.

After his experience helming Alien 3 for 20th Century Fox, Fincher claimed that he’d rather “die of colon cancer than make another movie.” This oft-quoted, grandly self-pitying proclamation clarifies Alien 3 ’s themes of noble martyrdom, with Ellen Ripley dying by her own hand for her corporate overseers’ sins. It also establishes the morbid mindset necessary to embrace a property like Se7en , which came to Fincher after being rejected by its original director and subjected to studio demands for a more palatable rewrite—i.e., one that didn’t end with a head in a box. The draft with the head in the box, as Fincher is fond of pointing out, was the one that he preferred.

The details of Se7en ’s genesis as an edgy industry outlier speak to a mid-’90s moment where mini-major studios like New Line were all aiming to make their own versions of The Silence of the Lambs , which in addition to its awards haul was a tantalizing case study in return on investment. New Line’s hunger for an R-rated hit connected with Fincher’s yearning for genuine directorial control—a lust that’s legible not only in Se7en ’s laboriously worked-over and bleach-bypassed frames, but also at the core of its story, with its shifting power dynamics and ever-deepening ambiguity about who’s pursuing whom. In interviews, Fincher admitted that he was bored by the ritualistic police-procedural aspects of Se7en ’s script; what kept him hooked was the creeping, insidious sense of purpose encoded in John Doe’s project, and the vise-like tension therein between surprise and inevitability. “I found myself getting more and more trapped in this kind of evil,” he told Empire in 1996. “And even though I felt uncomfortable about being there, I had to keep going.”

Walker’s screenplay is notably bereft of detours or digressions, forging relentlessly ahead and littering its dialogue with suggestions of momentum. These begin following Somerset’s admonition to his partner to “look” and “listen” in a city whose baseline threshold for brutality is above and beyond. (Walker wrote Se7en as an anti–love letter to New York after an unhappy stint living there in the 1980s.) “I’ve worked homicide for five years,” Mills protests, before Somerset chides him, sharply: “Not here.” Mills nods grudgingly, and his partner continues: “Over the next seven days, Detective, you’ll do me the favor of remembering that.”

Instantly, a pre-ordained time frame is established: “the next seven days,” initially identified as the length of time prior to Somerset’s announced retirement date, and repurposed predictively as the span of John Doe’s rampage. As Se7en continues, the characters’ conversations keep alluding to that same numerologically determined vanishing point, as well as a more general sense of impending doom. “You can expect five more of these,” says Somerset to his superior (R. Lee Ermey) after the discovery of the second body. “This isn’t going to have a happy ending,” he tells Mills later on, setting up the final act. “I feel like saying more, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise,” smirks John Doe over the phone, taunting his pursuers and the viewer simultaneously with the knowledge of his eventual coup de grâce .

Of course, the unhappy ending prophesied by Detective Somerset is the surprise alluded to by John Doe. While there has been much documentation about the different incarnations of Walker’s script and, in particular, the events of its climax, the central idea—seven murders for seven sins in seven days—was always present. It’s a conceptual framework so tight that it could potentially paralyze any director who took it on, but for Fincher, the script’s rigid boundaries and smaller scale were in sync with a resolve to downsize his process after Alien 3 ’s gigantism. “I thought I was making a tiny genre movie,” the director told Sight and Sound in 1996. “I tried not to have a hundred fucking trucks, but every time you take the camera out of the box, it gets complicated.” The same fastidiousness that had seen Fincher branded as a control freak was now perfectly suited to a parable of perfectionism—one deceptively less invested in its archetypal crime-solvers and their occasional, all-too-human sloppiness than the ways in which they’re instrumentalized by their quarry as victims and even accidental perpetrators.

In terms of point of view, Se7en is recognizably aligned with the two cops, who are dichotomized by a set of Platonic binaries: not only veteran and rookie—a contrast smartly informed by the casting of ace character actor Freeman and emerging heartthrob Pitt—but also Black and white (which tapped into the racialized “wisdom” associated with Freeman’s famous roles in Driving Miss Daisy [1989] and The Shawshank Redemption [1994] ) ; bachelor and husband (the two only start to bond after Tracy arranges a group dinner date); cerebral and impulsive (Somerset’s physical and linguistic delicacy are offset by Mills’s thick syllables and two-fisted posturing); and, most crucially, pragmatism and idealism.

On this point, William Somerset is a nicely layered character, at once principled and evasive, familiar and yet oddly remote as an entry point into the story. Freeman projects his usual intelligence, but also a flinty reticence that’s not always sympathetic—or convincing. Somerset’s capitulation via early retirement to the ambient helplessness of his surroundings is no less misanthropic for being cloaked in the language of home truths (“apathy is a solution,” he sighs bitterly). Meanwhile, Mills’s belief in the eternal verities of justice and retribution (and dishing them out) is only partially compromised by his congenital hotheadedness: his joke about wanting to be Frank Serpico comes from a place of real longing for heroism. As much as Somerset tries to suggest that this attitude is misplaced, Pitt’s pumped-up yet emotionally translucent performance—sandwiched in between Freeman’s relaxed mastery and Spacey’s implosive pyrotechnics—never loses sight of his character’s essential righteousness.

Se7en cultivates plenty of pleasing odd-couple comedy from the detectives’ contrasting manner and slow creep toward friendship, an arc derived from racially-coded buddy-cop movies like Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon (1987) , although lessons about racial solidarity are not on the film’s agenda. The pair’s warring viewpoints ultimately converge, however perversely, in the work and words of John Doe, which frighteningly and suggestively synthesizes Somerset’s nihilism—his contention that people are beyond saving—with Mills’s impulsive idealism, while superseding both on an aesthetic level. Because the world in which Se7en takes place— this place , as Somerset calls it; this city , as later echoed by Tracy—is tailor-made, without exception, to John Doe’s (and Fincher’s) judgmental specifications, the detectives’ attempts to foil him can only be futile. When Somerset cries at a moment of truth that, “John Doe has the upper hand,” it’s less startling than reassuring: the actor’s delivery generates the feeling of jagged, metallic pieces locking seamlessly into place.

Se7en ’s most serrated point—its amoral, and thoroughly auteurist, organizing principle—is that Somerset and Mills’ double act embodies not law-and-order, but an existential threat to the satisfaction promised by what its auteur-as-killer calls, “the whole complete act.” Which is to say: the satisfaction, for us in the audience, of perceiving the complete and fully realized work of art that Se7en at once narrativizes and stands in for in a wryly self-allegorizing fashion.

Excerpt from the new book David Fincher: Mind Games by Adam Nayman published by Abrams, available November 23, 2021. Text copyright © 2021 Adam Nayman and Little White Lies.

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Seven Plot Summary

In a city plagued by violent crime and corruption, seasoned police detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) stands one week away from retirement. He finds himself partnered with the fiery and idealistic detective David Mills (Brad Pitt), who recently moved to the city with his wife, Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow).

The “Seven Deadly Sins” Murder Investigation Begins

On a Monday, Somerset and Mills probe the horrifying case of an obese man compelled to eat until his stomach ruptures, leading to his death. The detectives discover the word “gluttony” scrawled on a wall. Somerset seeks reassignment from the gruesome case, deeming it too harsh for his final investigation, but his request is denied. The subsequent day unveils another victim, forced to cut a pound of flesh from his body, a crime scene marked “greed”. Further clues guide Somerset and Mills to the “sloth” victim, leaving Somerset to deduce that the murders align with the biblical concept of the seven deadly sins.

Somerset and Tracy’s Private Conversation

Invited over for supper by Tracy, Somerset finds common ground with the Mills. Later, Tracy privately meets Somerset and shares her dismay at moving to the city, her pregnancy, and her apprehensions about raising a child in such a place. Having once persuaded a girlfriend to terminate their child due to similar concerns, Somerset advises Tracy to tell Mills only if she decides to keep the baby.

Tracing the Culprit and Confronting John Doe

Spurred by a comment from Mills, Somerset tracks library records for anyone researching the seven deadly sins, leading them to John Doe’s apartment. Upon Doe’s unexpected return, a pursuit ensues, with Doe briefly capturing Mills before escaping. Inside Doe’s apartment, the detectives uncover the disturbing breadth of his psychopathy.

The Final Victims and Doe’s Surrender

The detectives find the “lust” and “pride” victims on consecutive days, their murders as grotesque and symbolic as the ones before. Upon returning to the station, John Doe (Kevin Spacey) surrenders himself, demanding to be escorted by Mills and Somerset to an undisclosed location where the final two victims, “envy” and “wrath,” will be revealed.

The Unfolding of Doe’s Masterplan

As they drive to the location, Doe proclaims his divine mission to shed light on the pervasiveness and society’s indifference towards sin. Upon reaching the site, a delivery van approaches, containing a package explicitly for Mills. Somerset intercepts it, his horror at its contents prompting him to urge Mills to drop his weapon. Doe confesses to being “envy,” revealing he coveted Mills’ life with Tracy and implying the package contains Tracy’s severed head. He incites Mills to embody “wrath,” cruelly informing him of Tracy’s plea for her and her unborn child’s life. Mills, in his grief and rage, shoots Doe, thereby fulfilling Doe’s gruesome plan.

As the police lead the catatonic Mills away, Somerset tells his captain he will “be around,” indicating his reconsideration of retirement. In voiceover, he recites a quote from Ernest Hemingway, “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for”— affirming his agreement with the latter part of the statement.

Movie Review

“Seven” is a 1995 American psychological thriller film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, and Kevin Spacey. The movie follows two detectives, a rookie and a seasoned veteran, as they investigate a series of gruesome murders inspired by the seven deadly sins.

The film is a dark and gripping exploration of human depravity and the consequences of unchecked evil. Its atmospheric storytelling, chilling performances, and shocking twists have made it a landmark in the thriller genre and a testament to Fincher’s mastery as a filmmaker.

The film’s visual style, from its gritty cinematography to its somber color palette, creates a grim and oppressive atmosphere that mirrors the dark subject matter. The meticulous attention to detail, from the crime scenes to the production design, adds a layer of realism and immersion to the narrative.

The screenplay, written by Andrew Kevin Walker, presents a harrowing narrative that delves into the depths of human depravity. The film explores themes of morality, guilt, and the consequences of unchecked sin. It confronts the audience with the disturbing realities of human nature and the blurred lines between good and evil. The dialogue is sharp and evocative, delivering thought-provoking lines that stay with the viewers long after the film ends.

The stark contrast between the young and impulsive Detective Mills, played by Brad Pitt, and the experienced and contemplative Detective Somerset, played by Morgan Freeman, creates a compelling dynamic. The film delves into their personal struggles and motivations, showcasing the impact of their experiences and the toll of the investigation on their psyches.

The film’s musical score, composed by Howard Shore, adds an eerie and atmospheric layer to the storytelling. The haunting melodies and dissonant tones complement the dark and unsettling tone of the film, heightening the tension and amplifying the emotional impact of key scenes.

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‘7 (Seven)’ review: An ‘investigative thriller’ that will make you LOL

7' (seven) is what happens when you think you've written a gripping film, and then when it is adapted to the screen, you learn that it can be two different things.

Published - June 05, 2019 04:37 pm IST

A still from 7(Seven)

Caricature. This word kept popping up in my head as I watched cinematographer Nizar Shafi's debut directorial 7 (Seven) because a lot of what unfolds in the film is caricature...ish. The hero, the cop (Rahman), the women, and even the journalist's character (with a jolna bag, kurta and nerdy glasses) all exist to prove that point.

Where to begin? Well, credit where it is due, Shafi's camera work is bearable for its nearly two hour run time. Nothing exemplary about it, but it isn't jarring to prompt a quick exit from the theatre. The list of "pros" ends there.

The writing is a big letdown. One particular scene, early on in the film, where an old man meets Rahman's ACP Vijay Prakash to share vital info, helped me make my mind up about what was in store. Soon as he drops a bombshell — in other words, plot la twist — he is revealed to be a mental patient, and is dragged out of the cop's room by a doctor and a ward boy all in a matter of five seconds! Shafi, going forward, should consider deputing this responsibility to someone who understands the difference between scripting for a staged drama and a movie.

• Cast: Havish, Regina Cassandra, Rahman, Nandita Swetha, Anisha Ambrose
• Director: Nizar Shafi
• Storyline: A man who is suspected of cheating many women after marrying them, is actually the victim of a cunning plot hatched by a psychotic woman

Then there's the romance. I can stand mokka comedy, but why present it as acceptable commentary between a couple in a relationship? Sample this. Nandita Swetha (as Ramya — a 'why did I do this role?') tells Havish that her family is urging her to get married soon. To which the hero responds, "Ponnunga na konjam freedom kudukkanum!"... and this revolutionary response is greeted with a "romba matured ah pesureenga!"

But what gripped me from start to end of this film was a feeling of 'What am I watching?' (minus the profanity). David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is name-dropped more than twice. Shafi himself appears in a blink-and-you-miss cameo to put forward the point that perhaps the mystery we're "investigating" in this film is something similar to what we saw in Fincher's. But when has a thriller ever been straightforward?

And so it proves, when Regina Cassandra is revealed to be the key. But wait! She is not. It is actually the older version of Regina. Credit to the elderly artiste who played that role, but when she yells at Havish... "Neeya sethuru, illana naa unna konnuduven!", the audience had a hearty laugh. I think it isn't too difficult to draw a parallel between the situations of the watching public and Havish!

Because 7 (Seven) is what happens when you think you've written a gripping film, and then when you adapt it to screen, you learn that it can be two different things.

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