The road to Halloween is paved with good films. Wherein we countdown to the spirited season with a hundred doses of horror. 17 days to go.
Once upon a time, a near-perilous pre-production and shooting of an ill-favoured third installment of a monster franchise brought the movie world a new saviour behind the camera. Considered a flop in cinema terms, Alien 3 had it’s merits, for sure, with regard to the superb technical visual aspect. And this was down to talented music video director David Fincher.
Fincher had to put up and shut up there. With a poor, insult of regurgitated narrative material, and a production journey that night as well have been hiring armless jugglers. But, the director, this new kid on the block, did open his mouth, and got the film made. And Alien 3 was directed superbly. Everyone starts somewhere.
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That very cinematic voice would then make a landmark film. Truly showing the world what he was capable if, and that which he was allowed to promise with his first feature.
Se7en was David Fincher’s second chance to demonstrate his greatness as a feature film maestro. Not that he owed any of us such liberties. Is this grim masterpiece still not his finest work? How was he ever supposed to surpass this? And that’s saying a hell of a lot, from the man who would bring us Fight Club, Zodiac, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl.
In a year with great efforts from the likes of Michael Mann (Heat), Ron Howard (Apollo 13) and Ang Lee (Sense and Sensibility), for me Fincher’s master stroke reinvigorated modern film noir and detective chase tale. Watching it now, over twenty years on, Se7en remains a blueprint for his unmatched photographic style and articulate pacing.
Fincher marked an instant reputation as a force to be reckoned with behind the camera. Creating a motion picture that shuddered so much impact from its audience, that it scarred you long before you were even allowed to digest it. I remember the sucker punch trauma and the immense adoration that came with seeing this film the first time. Honestly, that doesn’t leave you.
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With the ludicrously lone Oscar nomination for Richard Francis-Bruce’s Film Editing (which should have won by a mile), Se7en was clearly too much for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to swallow. Not even the introduction of a Best Achievement in Title Sequence Design award in honor of Kyle Cooper’s majestic brilliance.
Binding the whole genius together like super-glue is the tight, methodical crime story. Never distractingly over-complicated, always luring you in whether you want to taste the brutality or not. It’s an education in crime and detective work, in tension and twists, but more than that, an unmissable study in well-crafted writing and film-making.
A crime story focusing on the seven deadly sins, my God of course. The appropriately named Se7en does not just utilize this notion effectively, but turns it so far inside out that screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker leaves your head spinning, rattled with turmoil.
From the opening moments of a shocking murder scene, through observant detective banter. Before delving deep into a rich mix-match of a partnership between the story’s protagonists, Mills and Somerset, Walker’s screenplay is one of a kind.
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Such an audacity to believe you could create something this twisted, let alone actually write it. A deceptively cold, calculating, compelling companion to director Fincher’s expert vision.
There are also tints of perfectly timed and naturalistic humor too. Somerset’s private astonishment when Mill’s wife claims he is the funniest man she ever met while the wise detective watches his younger partner wrestle with his dogs. Or Mills later exclaiming about the serial killer’s book acquisition or mental state, that just because the fucker’s got a library card it don’t make him Yoda.
Set in a dark world, both in tone and actuality, cinematographer, Darius Khondji, brings vivid light and depth to Se7en throughout. In fact, this is frame-for-frame an immaculately shot shock-fest, an endless visual feast. Albeit an agonizing one.
Far too many examples to do the film justice here, this is literally the case that every blink you are missing something remarkable. We knew Khondji extremely well following the elaborately flawless cinematography he produced for Delicatessen. Even so, the masterful work on Seven was still a splash of ice cold water to the face.
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Hardly ever have such bleak, colorless moving pictures depicting truly awful, draining experiences, appeared so enticing to the eye. Khondji’s images penetrate the audience, his camera capturing big fat rain seemingly ebbing across the barrel of a gun. Or pulling away effortlessly from a smashed open door – filling the frame with enough shadow and torch-light to be stories all on their own.
Bringing you so close to the human horrors on show – much of which is harrowingly left to the imagination – the camera almost forces you to look closer. Smell the fear. Experience the trauma for yourself. And you simply can not / will not take your eyes from the screen.
So, I’ve barely scratched the surface of David Fincher’s Se7en. This is a mesmerizing motion picture, a detective story / horror cross-breed, brimming with morbidly dazzling technical brilliance. You name it, exquisite photography, suspenseful story-telling, haunting score, razor-sharp sound design, want me to go on?
We also have at the forefront some fine acting. Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt might be an oddity of casting anywhere else. But with Se7en it makes perfect sense of a partnership stretching in opposite directions. And they have an organic, immersive chemistry. A classic balance of smart, logic, cocky and intuitive.
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Gwyneth Paltrow is also devastatingly good, in the few scenes she had, in trying to peel away a layer of awful reality before her. And of course, the uncredited Kevin Spacey, having a great year in 1995, here turning up in the final act to swallow it whole as his own. The performances, from all concerned, deliver perfect justice to a motion picture relishing the sum of its parts.
With David Fincher you have to go right back to Alien 3, his first feature. No, it was not the
experience he perhaps wanted when he took to directing motion pictures. What the third
Alien movie did do, though, with his framing and movement of the camera, was force you to
pay attention to this new director on the scene. I was a fan of Fincher from that moment.
Se7en haunts you. And I am not just talking
about that ending. While you’re watching it – whether the first time or seventh – and long, long after. Fincher directs with expert finesse, clearly thriving alongside cinematographer Khondji’s stunning pictorial brush strokes. Helping establishing the director as an executor of astute, exceptional film photography. A filmmaker who respects his audience so much to have them shit their pants.
The disturbing building blocks of Se7en‘s ultimately cruel narrative is as gripping as anything you will see in the last twenty-plus years. Culminating in a climax you dare not have imagined in your worst nightmares. The movie had pulled you right in long before then, and likely after that shocking denouement you are never coming back. Cinema at it’s most bravura, and most unforgiving.
