Kevin Spacey in Se7en. Image courtesy of New Line Cinema.
Man does this film hold up. It takes some very well-traveled tropes – the young detective on the job paired with the about-to-retire veteran, and other typical hard-boiled noir and detective elements – and then uses them to tell a truly original story that is darkly fascinating and utterly compelling. This is David Fincher we are talking about, so of course the film is aesthetically terrific to look at, leaning into some very dark imagery and making great use of traditional cinematic language of noir like rain and shadows. There are certain scenes in this film (you know the ones) that are staged so effectively, the impression of having seen a nightmare will stay with you for a long time.
Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman are good. Pitt works mainly as an unremarkable young dumb guy – he’s meant to be the audience stand-in. Freeman is the film’s elder statesmen, the Wise Old Man and the moral compass, a symbol of a fading system of values in a world awash with sin and avarice. But Spacey is of course given the most scenery to chew, and he relishes it. In real-life is he a sex-crazed pervert asshole? Yes, apparently. But this role, when he was in the throes of his mid-1990s apotheosis, is a classic and he is such a good embodiment of detached, sociopathic evil. It’s great casting, and a great performance.
What’s so satisfying about this film, of course, is that the visual style and the acting all work in service of an insanely diabolical and shocking plot. This film is very carefully and intricately structured, from a script by Andrew Kevin Walker who I had ever heard of but is apparently a very active script doctor. He doesn’t have too many big credits to his name, but if this one is anything to go by he might be responsible for polishing quite a few turds behind the scenes.
Famously, of course, the threads of the film all come together in the end in such a way as to genuinely blow your mind in the most fucked up way possible. “What’s in the box!” has entered the pop culture lexicon for a good reason – because it’s part of a really great ending, and endings are hard. But that pay-off would be nothing if the script hadn’t carefully done the work of building up to it, taking us step-by-step through the monstrous would of this film and the escalating acts of depravity tied together by the thinnest of theological strings that even so might be faintly resonant with an audience that agrees the world is coming apart at the seams.
It’s just a great film, part of a raft of them that kind of surged up during the middle of the Clinton presidency for some reason, before we knew that Kevin Spacey was a creep. A simpler time, for a fucking great and fucked up piece of cinema.