CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale
DAVID FINCHER’S Seven takes place in a drenched, sleazy metropolis, not unlike New York, where there’s a deadly sin on every corner. Plumbing untold depths of atmosphere, he creates a fairly routine buddy cops-meet-serial killer movie with an intelligence and craft that make the result genuinely disturbing.
Brad Pitt is Detective David Mills, the cop on transfer from upstate who, in the urban chaos of the big brutal city, becomes yet another rookie in the jaded eyes of his partner, Lieutenant William Somerset (beautifully played by Morgan
The two are teamed up for an investigation into a string of grotesque murders based on the Seven Deadly Sins. The first victim is an obese man who has been force-fed to death to make a point about gluttony. Each discovery of another corpse reveals a bizarre new Joseph Beuys-like art installation featuring a corpse despatched with stealthy precision by the kind of psychopath who seems to keep movies in business these days.
Underpinning the horror and scariness of the whole affair is the relationship between the two cops. Mills is dubious about psychos and the public phenomenon they have become; he mimics them: “Voices made me do it, my dog made me do it, Jodie Foster made me do it!”
Somerset is the more cerebral of the two, consumed by desire to exhaust all the possibilities to solve the crime. In addition, Mills’ young wife Tracy, sympathetically played by Gwyneth Paltrow, provides a domestic balance to the nightmare of the crimes.
>From the feverishly brilliant title sequence to its shocking end, the film propels itself on a morbid ride through a shock-filled noir world. Fincher, whose previous feature, Alien III, was also consummately styled, is perhaps best known for Madonna’s Vogue video. Cinematographer Darius Khondji achieved miracles for Jeunet and Caro in Delicatessen and the upcoming City of Lost Children, and so in Seven it is the image that becomes the real star.
Its tough, gritty, anamorphic style reminds one of The French Connection, while the contained, contrasty, scary moments feel like Klute or a similar paranoid 1970s thriller.
Although the plot is fairly routine and the cops’ petty squabbling gets a little long- winded, the atmospherics are so finely tuned that the film’s horror creeps deep inside the mind. The violence is never explicitly shown, we never see the killer at work, but the discovery of the crime scenes, photographic evidence and the psychological investigation behind them create a palpable sense of horror.
Fincher and his crew have created such a febrile atmosphere with a script that is at least halfway intelligent which is probably why Seven – made for a modest (by Hollywood standards) $20-million – beat all the Judge Dredds and Showgirls during the past US summer movie season.
Teenage girls and gay men can still drool over Brad, even though he’s fully clothed throughout, but don’t say I didn’t warn you – this is scary