Seven (Se7en)

Year: 1995 Rating: R Overall Evaluation: 9.5 Significance Suppositions Story Style 10.0 / 10 10.0 / 10 10.0 / 10 8.0 / 10 Click HERE for evaluation criteria.

Style

Rated R for grisly afterviews of horrific and bizarre killings, and for strong language. Many F-words, profane name-calling, and blasphemous references to Jesus and God. Pretty rough, but to be honest, most of the gore is understated. It is interesting to me how many people say they did not finish watching the film due to these elements, yet oddly these gory scenes are relatively few and brief at that. Like a good horror movie, it leaves the imagination to do its work, often to greater effect.

Story

A serial killer known only as John Doe is being hunted by two detectives - one young and naive, the other old and jaded. Doe's M.O. is that he kills his victims in Dantean fashion according to their sins (each is one of the seven deadly sins).

[SPOILER WARNING!]

The killer turns himself in in order to explain what he has been doing. In the end the young cop kills him in wrath (the final of the seven deadly sins) over the murder of his wife.

The story is a great detective movie as well as a morality play. Excellent characters, plotlines, etc. All around very well done.

Suppositions

Although rather disturbing at many levels, the film does not ask much of the audience in terms of suspension of disbelief. Its realism is scary in and of itself.

Significance

I don't know if even the writers suspected how well they were portraying the basic problem of our modern society, but if there is a movie that exactly demonstrates the moral bankruptcy of our relativistic culture, this is it. The movie sets us up for a monster and, as the older detective says, we get only a man. He's not even clearly insane. Of course, we know John Doe's actions to be inhuman and evil, but the pluralist has no answer as to why this is the case. Only in a world with objective morals can anyone really claim to be in the moral right or judge another to be in the wrong. As the detectives question Doe and his motives they find the killer's rationale more difficult to argue against than they would have thought and are thus unable to get anywhere with him. Consider Doe's words to them as he responds to the idea that he killed innocent people (one essential qualification for murder):

"Only in a world this sh**ty could
you even try to say these were innocent
people and keep a straight face.
You see a deadly sin on every street corner,
and in every home, literally. And we tolerate it.
Because it's common, it seems trivial, and
we tolerate it, all day long, morning, noon
and night. . . Not anymore."

The detectives assume that their own moral intuitions are sufficient to condemn Doe's evil actions, yet he easily turns the tables on every argument. At the climax, one of the most powerful in film history, Doe proves he is right. Seen as a tragedy (in the classic sense - a story wherein the hero is destroyed because he chooses the wrong course of action in the face of a challenge), this is a pointed negative message about the consequences of a relativistic morality that relies on personal desires and opinions rather than a moral code higher than any one person. Fantastic.