Se7en (1995) Review
9/10
It rains for the entire film except at the very end, when the sky clears and they drive out to open country, and by then you know that cannot be good.
Two detectives, seven murders arranged around the deadly sins, and a killer who is several steps ahead throughout and never once in doubt about what he is doing.
What separates it from the hundred imitations is that it is a film about whether the world can be borne, with a procedural attached. The murders are the delivery mechanism for an argument between two men who have looked at the same evidence and reached opposite conclusions.
The 9 is for a film that commits to its argument and refuses the exit it is offered in the final ten minutes. The gore is almost entirely implied, the killer is barely present, and the ending is one of the very few in mainstream cinema where the antagonist gets precisely what he wanted. The point withheld is for a second act that leans on coincidence more than the first.
The Opening Nobody Skips
The credit sequence is scratched film, obsessive handwriting, close-ups of hands cutting and pasting and stitching, all cut to a degraded remix of a Nine Inch Nails track. It runs about two minutes.
Kyle Cooper designed it and it changed title sequences permanently. Before this, credits were typography over an establishing shot. After this, they were a place to do character work.
The economy of it is the achievement. By the time John Doe appears in person, more than ninety minutes in, he needs no introduction at all, because the audience has spent the whole film inside the evidence of his method. You have seen his hands and his handwriting and you know what kind of patience he has.
It also announces the film’s texture before a single scene. Everything will be wet, dark, decaying and hand-made. Nothing will be clean.
There is a practical benefit too. A killer who is absent for most of a film is a hard sell to an audience, and the sequence buys Fincher the room to keep him offscreen.
An opening should establish the rules of the world instead of the events of the plot. Two minutes of somebody’s hands and handwriting told the audience who they were dealing with more efficiently than any scene could have, and it bought the film ninety minutes of the villain’s absence. Ask what your first page teaches the reader about how this book will behave, and whether it earns you anything later.
The practical version is to decide what your first page is buying. Se7en’s title sequence buys the villain’s absence for ninety minutes, which is a structural purchase instead of an atmospheric one. Fincher could keep Doe offscreen because the audience already had a sense of his patience, and an audience with that sense will wait.
So ask what a reader must believe by the end of your opening for the middle of the book to work, then build the opening to establish exactly that and nothing else. Openings fail when they try to establish plot, because plot is what the following chapters are for. Rules, texture and character are what only a beginning can do cheaply.
The City Has No Name
It is never identified. There are no landmarks, no local references, no license plates that resolve, nothing to place it. Fincher and the writer Andrew Kevin Walker have both confirmed this was deliberate.
A named city invites the audience to think about that city and its particular problems. An unnamed one becomes every city, which is what the argument requires, because the film is asking whether urban indifference is a survivable condition instead of whether one place has gone wrong.
It is also why the film has not dated. There is no technology, no politics and no geography to anchor it to 1995.
The rain does similar work. It rains without explanation for the entire running time, and it makes the city feel like a condition instead of a location. When it finally stops, the film has moved somewhere with no shelter at all.
Darius Khondji shot it, and the technique was to underexpose and then use a silver retention process in the printing, which crushes the blacks and makes the highlights sit oddly. It looks like nothing else from that decade and it still looks deliberate instead of dated.
Somerset’s line about apathy being a solution because it is so much easier is the thesis, and it is delivered quietly, in a bar, by a man who has already decided to leave.
Two Detectives, One Argument
Somerset has thirty years of this and is retiring in a week. Mills has just transferred in, requested the city, and believes the work is worth doing.
The film is scrupulously fair to both. Somerset is not a burnt-out cliché; he is the more intelligent man, reads Chaucer and Dante in the library to understand the case, and his position is thoroughly argued. Mills is not naive; he is competent, brave and correct that somebody has to care.
Their disagreement is the actual content of the film. Every scene between them is the same conversation from a different angle: whether looking at this material honestly obliges you to withdraw from the world or to fight it.
The dinner scene at the Mills apartment is the hinge, and it is the only warm sequence in the picture. Tracy invites Somerset, the train shakes the building, they laugh about it, and for ten minutes there are three people who like each other. That scene exists so that the ending will work.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Tracy is given one substantial scene, the meeting with Somerset in the diner where she tells him she is pregnant and does not want the child raised here. It is the most important scene in the film and almost nothing in the plot depends on it.
Doe understands the argument better than either of them, and constructs an ending that resolves it by making Somerset right.
If your story contains a debate, give the position you disagree with your best writing. Somerset’s case for withdrawal is more articulate than Mills’s case for engagement, and the film is stronger for it, because a reader who can dismiss one side is not watching an argument, they are watching a lecture. The scene that makes an ending land is usually the one where nothing happens.
The method is to write your strongest prose for the position you disagree with. Somerset’s case for withdrawal is more articulate than Mills’s case for engagement, and the film is stronger for it, because a reader who can dismiss one side is watching a lecture instead of an argument.
The related move is to build the scene that makes your ending work well before the ending. The dinner at the Mills apartment is warm, funny and irrelevant to the plot, and without it the final ten minutes are merely unpleasant. Find the scene where your characters simply like each other, and put it in.
The Ending That Was Nearly Cut
New Line wanted it changed. There were versions discussed in which the box contains a dog, in which Mills does not fire, in which Somerset intervenes successfully.
Fincher and Pitt refused, and Pitt’s contract reportedly made the script’s ending a condition of his participation. The version that exists is the one where Doe’s plan completes exactly as designed and the detective becomes the seventh sin.
It works because Doe is not caught in a struggle. He surrenders, walks into the police station with his hands up and blood on his sleeves, and directs the final act from the back seat of a car. He was never going to be stopped, because being stopped was never a risk he had taken.
The film also never shows you the contents of the box, and that restraint is what makes the scene unbearable. You learn what is in it from a man’s face and another man’s voice.
Somerset’s closing narration is the only comfort on offer and it is thin on purpose. Hemingway wrote that the world is a fine place and worth fighting for, and Somerset says he agrees with the second part.
That is the correct ending for the argument the film has been having. He does not agree that it is fine. He is going to stay anyway, and staying is the most the film will grant.
The strongest version of a bleak ending is one the antagonist chose and the protagonist completes voluntarily. Nobody is overpowered here. Doe does not win by being stronger or luckier; he wins by understanding Mills better than Mills understands himself, and every element of the trap is built out of the protagonist’s own character. Construct your antagonist’s victory from your hero’s temperament and it will read as inevitable instead of cruel.
The mechanism to steal is that your antagonist’s plan should be constructed from your protagonist’s specific temperament, not from general human weakness. Doe does not exploit anger in the abstract. He exploits the fact that Mills requested this city, believes the work matters, and has a wife he has told nobody about.
Test it by asking whether the trap would work on somebody else. If it would, your antagonist is merely competent and the ending reads as bad luck. If it only works on this person, for reasons the reader watched you establish, the ending reads as inevitable, and inevitability is what makes a bleak conclusion feel earned.
What Fincher Learned From Alien 3
This was his second feature. The first was Alien 3, which was taken away from him, recut, and which he has publicly refused to acknowledge as his work.
That experience is visible in every decision here. The insistence on the ending. The refusal to show the box. The complete control of the look. Fincher arrived at Se7en having already learned what happens when a director negotiates.
It is also why the film is so tightly built. There is very little in it that a studio could remove without collapsing something else, which is a structural defense as much as an artistic choice.
The film made over three hundred million dollars against a thirty-three million budget, established Fincher permanently, and made the ending non-negotiable in retrospect.
He was thirty-three when he made it, and that the reputation for control which now precedes him was earned by having lost it once.
Should you watch Se7en?
Yes, and it is less graphic than its reputation suggests. You see aftermath and evidence instead of acts, which is more disturbing than depiction and also why it holds up. The exception is the final scene, which is devastating and shows nothing at all. Do not watch it expecting a thriller; it is an argument with a body count.
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This film appears on 8 of my film lists