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It had to end with the box. It nearly didn’t.
Before David Fincher received a draft of Andrew Kevin Walker’s script for his 1995 psychological thriller Seven, he’d sworn off the possibility of ever directing again, still reeling from his notoriously rocky experience on his debut feature, Alien 3, which had ultimately been taken out of his hands. (“I’d rather die of colon cancer than make another movie,” he colorfully put it.) Walker’s script had already gone through various permutations since 1989, most notably a twist ending that had been written out of subsequent drafts for being irredeemably bleak. Yet, the original version was the one that Fincher read and he was unwilling to compromise, despite persistent pressure from executives and test screenings that seemed to confirm that it was too bleak an ending.
Now 30 years later, Seven is proof that audiences don’t know what they want until you give it to them. Or that all audiences are not the same, even if Hollywood is often desperate to appeal to everyone at once. There have been so many hacky imitations of the film since – so many that have mimicked its neo-noir edginess and its baroque depiction of serial murder – that it can be hard to remember the impact the film had at the time, when there was nothing else quite like it. While The Silence of the Lambs had legitimized this sort of grisly undertaking, it nonetheless took place in a world where evils could be banished and traumas eased. Fincher’s urban hellscape suggests another level of malevolence, a world embodied more by its sinister villain than hard-nosed detectives out to stop him. Maybe it was a place viewers recognized.
To that end, Morgan Freeman’s weary, soulful performance as William Somerset, the soon-to-be-retired lieutenant detective at a godforsaken precinct, now seems like a dry run for Tommy Lee Jones’ ageing lawman in No Country for Old Men. Both men have aged into a present that’s beyond their capacity to comprehend, much less control, despite their considerable veteran wile. But even a seen-it-all type like Somerset has trouble wrapping his mind around the case that will occupy his final week on the job, when he planned to pass the baton to David Mills (Brad Pitt), a volatile young detective who had perversely requested a transfer to his miserable, rain-choked, crime-ridden domain. Somerset knows from the first horrific murder that another one is coming, and probably many more after that.
The buddy-cop dynamic between Somerset and Mills is conceived broadly, with Somerset the worldly and methodical sage and Mills the brash hothead who acts on impulse. Yet over the course of the film, the distance between them in age, experience and temperament doesn’t narrow so much as syncopate into real chemistry, which is credit to Freeman and Pitt’s performances. In time, they develop a complementary skill set, owed in no small part to Mills’s wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), who insists on having Somerset over for dinner and seems to reintroduce them as humans, outside of the daily grind. There’s even a moment when they nearly outsmart their target and surprise him, but that’s about as far as it gets.
With cinematographer Darius Khondji imposing an insistently grim visual mood – the dark lighting, another concern for the studio, recalls Gordon Willis’s work on The Godfather – Fincher never shows any of the killings in Seven, but renders shocking tableaux from their aftermath. At the first crime scene, Somerset and Mills discover a morbidly obese shut-in face down in a plate of spaghetti, with his wrists and ankles bound by wire. At the second, a high-powered defense attorney is found in his office with a literal pound of flesh on the scales of justice, the word GREED written in blood on the carpet. The “John Doe” that Somerset and Mills are chasing has chosen the Seven Deadly Sins as a theme for serial murder, but his literary references are like a couple of semesters in the classics department, with nods to Dante, Milton, Chaucer and Shakespeare.
It’s funny to see a gritty procedural like Seven where the detectives have to hit the library – Mills turns out to be more of a Cliff’s Notes guy – but part of what distinguishes the film from its successors is how beautifully it merges the visceral with the philosophical. The film is every bit the hard-R shocker that made it a conversation piece in 1995, but Walker and Fincher’s obsession with evil as a theme manifests itself in the head and the gut simultaneously. Mills often tries to dismiss “John Doe” as a garden-variety sicko, but Somerset understands better the grotesque story that the killer is telling about the sins that have overwhelmed this unnamed, perhaps unsalvageable city. They are two sides of the same coin.
The ending of Seven works so effectively because Walker and Fincher make it inevitable in every dread-soaked frame. The same test audiences that might reject “the box” seem likely to have rejected the film’s entire point of view, but actual audiences responded in great force to a world they either recognized or feared, much like people responded to the pessimism of postwar noir. The unfortunate clones that followed Seven – two of which, Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider, starred Freeman– used the habits of a serial killer as a gross marketing gimmick, disconnected from any larger purpose. The terror of Fincher’s film is that John Doe not only controls what Somerset and Mills see, but seems to be directing our eyes, too. Seven is not about evil so much as it is a sensory immersion in it.
