Se7en: a movie review

Imagine a blighted city under the yoke of a ceaseless, dismal deluge. The city has an air of sorrow about it: like it’s been tormented by a gluttony of crime, unspeakable abominations, evils, iniquities, corruptions, atrocities, and wickedness. For detective William R. Somerset (Morgan Freeman), this has made the city his ball and chain. He is about to retire. He is jaded with the history of his career, gorged as it is with years and years of detecting sight after sight of butchery, abuse, abduction.

But the virginal detective David Mills (Brad Pitt) is nearly unspotted. He has hubris, arrogance, and a swagger about him. He knows about the city’s horrors in the gray matter between his ears; but he hasn’t fraternized with it. He hasn’t dropped his anchor into it yet, as Somerset has.

In the interim, an unhinged butcher is on the loose. His (her?) identity is a cliffhanger throughout the movie. We discover that the killer slaughters the victims according to the seven deadly sins. What brings the detectives together (for the first time) is a very disturbing scene. A very fat man is tied to a chair (with barbed wire!) and forced to eat until his stomach burst. I'll never forget it. The camera moves from behind him. His backside is a murky and unseemly oval. The skin is sickly pale and glimmering sweat soaks his shirt. The setting is his unkempt apartment. The smell is appalling. You’re wondering: who could have done this? And why? Well, we find out that his murder represented the sin of Gluttony.

The atmosphere of the movie is smothering. The colors have a luridness about them. The story breaks new creative ground. Art direction and set design need to be praised. They strive for an early 20th century aura, and the colors swathed on the screen are dark, with even the light designed to punctuate the gloom. I love the director David Finch, as he has directed another one of my favorite movies, The Game, with Michael Douglas. His style is almost palpable. The overall ambiance of the atmosphere is unflinching and rigid. The writing injects the characters with dialogue that is shrewd and perceptive.

The characters are strong, interesting, and the reason why the movie rises above its imitators. It is intelligent. Somerset is a bookish monk trapped in a detective’s body. He studies the great works of literature to get inside the mind of the killer. He reads Dante, Chaucer, and Milton. Mills goes with his gut, and when he is forced to read, opts for the Cliffnotes. There is good social psychology: I love it when Somerset tells Mills - anyone who spends a significant amount of time with me finds me disagreeable. There is a prolonged scene in the city library, Debussy plays in the background, Somerset is studying, and it is the ideal vehicle to display the killer’s intelligence against the likes of Somerset.

The taxi ride to the killer’s final destination is what compels us to call the film brilliant. The interchange is perfectly executed, swaying from casual chat, to inflamed rage, to provoked annoyance, to debate, to rationalization, to sermonizing. All the characters’s complexities and personalities rush together like like three waves. There is so much to discuss with nearly every major stage of the movie, but I’m bound to bypass it just because I’m giving a general review. Needless to say, I loved the movie; it did what it set out to do: give us the story of two distinct characters against the dramatic backdrop of a crazed madman, tinged with theology and literature, using the provocative motif of the seven deadly sins for his uncompromising sermon on what he thinks is a world gone mad with sin - and he is the ironical, paradoxical conduit of God’s wrath: God works in mysterious ways.