David Fincher makes a familiar detective story frightening through careful editing, oppressive darkness and Morgan Freeman’s watchful performance. Se7en is a superb thriller, though its insistence that everything is rotten sometimes tells us less than it thinks.
The outline of Se7en is familiar enough: mismatched detectives, a serial murderer and a pattern waiting to be recognised. David Fincher makes an exceptionally frightening thriller from it, and we recommend it with a firm warning about its cruelty. Andrew Kevin Walker’s screenplay organises the murders around the seven deadly sins, a scheme that might easily turn suffering into a sequence of ingenious clues. Fincher keeps making us attend to the damage instead. The investigation proceeds through the examination and discussion of what the killer has left behind.
We were horrified by how much the crime-scene glimpses made us imagine. A brief look, followed by a spoken account of what happened, can be harder to put aside than a prolonged view of violence; the explanation gives us time to understand the suffering. Fincher uses that delay with a care that does not make the experience any kinder. The acts themselves are largely withheld, and the film spends its time with people trying to comprehend their results.
Darius Khondji’s cinematography makes the darkness useful: looking into the frame becomes an uncomfortable effort, because a clear view offers little reassurance. Production designer Arthur Max gives that darkness a decaying city to work on, with scarcely any suggestion of comfort. The surroundings make the investigation feel exhausting before either detective has said much. It is an oppressive way to stage a police story, and the shadowed spaces keep the murders from feeling like isolated intrusions into an otherwise healthy place.
Morgan Freeman gives Somerset the patience needed to hold our attention inside all this ugliness. He makes the business of listening and thinking absorbing, and his measured delivery allows the horror to register without competing with it. Brad Pitt’s Mills supplies the friction, playing against Freeman’s composure with an impatience that can feel too emphatic. The difference is useful, even when we can see Walker arranging it. Their scenes together give us a reason to keep following the investigation.
Richard Francis-Bruce’s editing deserves much of the credit for keeping the violence so disturbing. The short glimpses are given enough room to register, while the discussion around them prevents the case from becoming a brisk procession of grisly exhibits. Howard Shore’s music helps sustain the unease, although we remember the images and Freeman’s voice more clearly than the score. Across 127 minutes, Fincher maintains an unusual degree of pressure without needing to show the mechanics of every attack.
The weakness is Walker’s insistence on finding corruption almost everywhere, until the city can seem constructed solely to support the killer’s view of it. There is intelligence in the sins motif, but less insight in the repeated suggestion that human beings are appalling. We began to resist being pressed so hard towards despair. Freeman’s performance gives the film some necessary doubt about that judgement, though it cannot always disguise how tightly the screenplay has arranged its people.
We value a serial-killer thriller that makes us reluctant to enjoy the neatness of its puzzle. The 18 certificate is worth taking seriously even when the violence stays outside the frame. Choose it when both people on the sofa want to be frightened; this is a poor film to spring on someone hoping to unwind.
