Part of Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair
“Nothing wrong with a man taking pleasure in his work. I won’t deny my own personal desire to turn each sin against the sinner.”
Gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, pride, lust — everyone has a sin. For detectives William Somerset and David Mills, they live among these sins every day, a crumbling city of crime all around them. But nothing can prepare the partners for the killings they are about to experience, all of which begins when they find a morbidly obese man who has died from the forced ingestion of spaghetti. What starts as one bizarre crime turns into a case of serial murders as a predator named John Doe begins to execute victims by paying homage to the “deadly sin” they represent. Directed by David Fincher and starring Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow and others.
“SEVEN, a dark, grisly, horrifying and intelligent thriller, may be too disturbing for many people, I imagine, although if you can bear to watch, it you will see filmmaking of a high order.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (Sep 22, 1995) “Who would have guessed that a grisly and upsetting serial-killer police procedural…would bear a startling resemblance to a serious work of art? One can already tell that this film is on to something special during the opening credits, which formally echo several classic American experimental films and thematically point to the eerie kinship between the serial killer and the police — not to mention the kinship between murder and art making that the movie is equally concerned with.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader (Sep 19, 1995)
