SE7EN

I have two good friends who are both avid movie fans and they have discovered that I haven’t seen many movies, that they consider absolute must-watches. So they decided to take my cinematographic education into their own hands, crashed my place at the weekend and started showing me those movies. We’ve gone through three that night and I intend to cover all of them, starting with David Fincher’s 1995 crime thriller Se7en.

This is the movie that innitialy hit me the hardest out of the three. It’s brutal and dark, it has a carefully curated grim and gritty atmosphere and an extremely intense ending that left me speechless a few minutes after seeing it. But after a few days to settle my thoughts, I actually thing it is the most straight forward out of the trifecta and the one I’d recommend to most people. I did enjoy it the most, but looking back on it, I doesn’t seem nearly as mind-blowing as the other two, looking almost simple in comparison.

My friends apparently love detective stories, given that all three of the movies were in some ways mysteries, and the noir aesthetics come through strongly in this one. The story is set in this grimy awful city, littered with crime and David Fincher makes sure to drive that atmosphere into your head. Murders are considered a day to day occurrence, soon-to-be mothers are afraid about their children growing up in such an enviroment and more conceptually, in the city it’s always raining, but when we get out, it immediately gets sunny and nice.

We follow two detectives, old and experienced William Somerset, (which is coincidentally the name of an english writer from the early 20th century, but i couldn’t find any connection between them), who’s disillusioned with society after years of working as a detective and views crime as natural and unavoidable and David Mills his young, stubborn and feisty partner. The characters are portraied by Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt and while i would argue that the performances given aren’t really the best of both man’s carriers (my enjoyment might have been hindered by terrible czech dubbing), the chemistry between the main characters is very tangible and we can clearly see their relationship develop from strangers that have to work together to close friends. The movie is really carried almost exclusively by these two, but we do get brief appearances from Gwyneth Paltrow as Mills’s wife and Kevin Spacey as the fantical murderer at the end.

I don’t want to spoil anything, because this film is really best experienced by oneself without knowing much about it, but i have to touch on the ending (without saying what happens). It is mindblowing. I believed that a good mystery story should have the attentive amongst it’s watchers, figure out the twist just few moments before it’s revealed and this one didn’t dissapoint. I guessed what was about to happen and yet it was still mindblowing, because Se7en takes a differrent approach. The twist is only a part of the ending and it can lead to two different conclusions. One heroic, that idealist Mills would expect and one tragic, that disillusioned Somerset would expect. And yet, at the end the roles are switched. Somerset does his best to achieve the heroic ending, but the choice is ultimately left to Mills, who, carefully maneuvered into an unsolvable situation, confirms Somerset’s worldview, leaving us with a bleak message, that in this dark world even the best can’t afford to be heroes.