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Seven
David Fincher
USA, 1995, 127 minutes
Review by Gerald Houghton (1996)

The set-up is hackneyed. Two mismatched city cops – the white, dumbass Mills (Brad Pitt, fine), and dignified, black, edge-of-retirement Somerset (Morgan Freeman, good) – track a serial killer concocting his grand masterpiece, a millennial address to mankind. Seven will die according to the tenets of the deadly sins.

So what makes Seven (or Se7en, as the titles have it) so good? What is it that elevates this above a Lethal Weapon meets Theatre of Blood rip-off? Let’s suggest it’s that disease currently afflicting the fringes of Hollywood – literacy. Which is not to suggest that the money men (and aren’t they always men?) have all gotten library cards and new spectacles, but that there has been a move recently towards pictures in which people actually talk to one another, where things happen for reasons other than just a bigger bang. Andrew Kelvin Walker’s script is pleasingly sharp, portentous but never ponderous, shot through with a keen sense of humour (there are smart jokes on Of Human Bondage and the Marquis de Sade). It drives the thing forward, getting, one might suggest, better and better. It’s almost as though he and director David Fincher want to get all the clichéd stuff out of the way early.

Fincher is the real star of the picture. This is only his second feature, his first after the ill-starred Alien 3, where he showed considerable promise despite a messy script, bereft of a second act. The mistakes aren’t repeated here, and his kinetic camera serves the material well. Pitt’s mid-movie chase of the suspect is a crisply edited, handheld tour de force, and careful handling of its potentially grisly elements makes Seven feel a lot more violent than it actually is. (All the killing takes place offscreen.)

Seven serves up an extraordinary vision of Hell on Earth. It rains almost throughout, and when it’s not, it’s either just starting or stopping. (As much to do with shooting restrictions as style, according to Fincher.) The city could be New York or Chicago or any one of a dozen other places, but like the Los Angeles in Blade Runner, it’s everywhere and nowhere. Imagine Scott’s film filtered through Parker’s Angel Heart and you’re halfway there. And it’s dark. Thick, blanket dark. Fincher had several hundred prints struck using silver retention, a process that re-bonds particles lost in conventional processing, making the brights brighter, the darks dense and sucking. The contrast with the shimmering desert-bound climax is telling. (The widescreen compositions and inky visuals make no concessions to video.) And Howard Shore, hardly Hollywood’s Mr. Happy, confers a score so sombre as to make his sterling work on The Silence of the Lambs sound like party music . . .

And what of that climax? Reputedly changed from first intentions, as it stands it’s tremendous. The last fifteen minutes or so are almost all talking, Walker’s script meditating on the nature of guilt and sin. Good as it was, even The Silence of the Lambs resorted to a conventional hide and seek finale. Here – as with The Usual Suspects – the audience leaves mentally, not physically sated. And like that film, knowing the end doesn’t preclude another look – Seven has clever spoken/visual ciphers that don’t insult its audience.

It would be overstating the case to say Seven breathes new life into the serial killer genre when what it actually does is nail the coffin lid shut. There are a few cavils (its treatment of women is questionable, even if the victims are predominantly men, for once), but this is really top dollar grim, intelligent, morbidly funny entertainment. The best of its kind since The Silence of the Lambs certainly, and possibly even the brilliant Manhunter. More of this would be most welcome.