An utterly horrifying crime thriller that changed the way I consumed movies.
Much as with my viewing of
Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) my sophomore year of college in 2010,
David Fincher’s Se7en would have an irreversible impact on me and my cinematic passions when I saw it in 2006. Before viewing
Se7en I had your run-of-the-mill movie knowledge, which is to say I knew which movies I liked and which I didn’t, and I doubtfully could name many directors other than the popular ones (e.g., Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino). David Fincher changed all of that with this gritty, horrifying neo-noir crime-thriller. As the credits rolled I immediately took note of his name, jumped to the computer, and made a list of all the movies he’d made that I needed to see - an action that would become habit that would become compulsory.
In
Se7en, two NYC police detectives attempt to track down a serial killer gruesomely murdering victims he believes align with the
seven deadly sins. Fincher and cinematographer
Darius Khondji manifest their interpretation of New York’s seedy underbelly - where every surface seems to be covered in a layer of filth and not even daylight can keep the darkness at bay - so completely and so realistically that it feels like if you breathe too deeply while watching you’ll catch a whiff of the incessant rot that seems to lurk around every corner, and if you don’t remain perfectly still you’ll be soaked to the bone by the pounding rain; or rub up against a grimy, dripping wall; or accidentally drag your foot through some dark puddle at a crime scene that’ll make you want to take the world’s hottest shower.
While it may not appeal to every movie watcher, this rare talent is what Fincher excels in, and what typically makes his films so compelling: the threatening, tangible atmospheres he creates. The brooding worlds of his movies feel genuinely lived in, more like a peek at an alternate reality than a work of fiction, and these realities seem to stitch themselves into ours while we watch, creating a dimensional suture where sensations intermingle.
Fincher is a unique filmmaker in his often unrelenting cynicism, a quality which firmly establishes itself in his projects, arousing a certain morbid curiosity, as outcasts and misanthropes - whether pissed off protagonists (e.g.
Fight Club [1999] and
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [2011]); sociopathic villains (e.g.
Se7en and
Zodiac [2007]); or something in between (e.g.
The Social Network [2010] and
Gone Girl [2014]) - who feel like they have a bone to pick with society drive the action in his films. His attitude towards his art can be neatly summed up in the following quote of his: “I don’t know how much movies should entertain. To me, I’m always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about
Jaws is the fact that I’ve never gone swimming in the ocean again.”
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