The city is an unidentified, vaguely drawn cesspool of an urban metropolis that is perpetually gray and wet. The crime is a serial killing spree that, upon investigation, proves to be so meticulously planned and executed that the term "spree" no longer applies. The title, Seven (1995, also spelled Se7en), refers to the seven deadly sins that inspire and define the murders. And the killer, who appropriates the name John Doe, treats his sadistic assault on society's "guilty" sinners like a calling, a modern campaign from a man reviving the work of an Old Testament God passing judgment in a soiled, corrupt world in need of a cleansing. Or at least a good kick to its complacency.

Written by Andrew Kevin Walker and directed by music video and commercial veteran David Fincher, Seven is a meticulously crafted film about the most meticulous serial killer since Hannibal Lecter, an insane genius who draws his inspiration from the classics: Dante, Milton, Chaucer, and in one scene, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. In addition to the deadly sins – gluttony, greed, sloth, greed, etc. – the title plays on the seven-day countdown of veteran Detective Lieutenant William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) before his retirement. Somerset is smart, classically educated, and observant, a once passionate policeman who has been worn down by the horrors he's witnessed on the job. You can see the toll it has taken in his eyes and his deliberate movements in the opening scenes, as he carefully dresses for work. Always so thoughtful and poised and careful, Somerset has one quirk: he carries a switchblade. Morgan Freeman makes even his handling of the knife precise and elegant.

Brad Pitt is the hungry, ambitious detective David Mills, who has transferred from his upstate beat and brought his young wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) with him. For a hot-shot young detective, he's oblivious to just how miserable she is in this dreary, oppressive city where the rain never stops and the urban cacophony never ends. The detective partnership, a burned-out veteran who reluctantly adopts and mentors the impulsive young neophyte who isn't half as seasoned as he believes he is, is a trope to be sure, but an effective one that pays off in the climax in ways that audiences in 1995 never saw coming.

Walker, who wrote the original screenplay while working at Tower Records, pushes the script into unexpected twists. If the appropriation of Armageddon literature and tool-of-God megalomania is more clever gimmick than thematic backbone, it makes for an insidiously effective hook for a modern murder mystery. To help maintain the sense of ambiguity, Fincher kept the identity of the actor playing the killer out of the opening credits. The ploy was not to surprise the audience with some shocking revelation, but merely to keep the audience as off-balance as the characters.

"I don't understand this place anymore," explains Somerset when asked why he's quitting the force. The diseased campaign of John Doe, executing sinners in excruciating ways while the world barely notices what's going on around them, only proves his point. But Fincher is careful to never let us see the murders, only the crime scenes, and even the victims are discreetly (if grotesquely) shown. He suggests the gruesome dimensions of the torturous murders with isolated details and morbid flourishes and lets the imagination of the viewers take it from there. When we're told that one victim, a veritable living corpse who looks more mummy than man, had "chewed off his own tongue long ago," there is no need for further visualization.

The sensibility is established in the creepy, unsettling opening credits by Kyle Cooper. Set to the harsh and distorted strains of Trent Reznor's music, the scratched and slashed-up shots of weird photos and pages of text being marked up and blacked out (ostensibly the research activities of our serial killer) jitter and stutter and seem to tear at themselves as they unfold on the screen. In Fincher's own words, it was his attempt to "pictorially represent aberrant thinking," and the effect, even after years of copycat credits borrowing the sensibility and the techniques, is discomforting and unnerving. Fincher returns to those images and scribblings when the detectives stumble upon John Doe's apartment and find room after room of plans and photos and a veritable library of notebooks filled with scores of notes crammed with tiny, neat writing. Fincher and his collaborators borrowed such details as these from the personal effects left behind by some of the more notorious real life serial killers.

The real star of Seven, however, is the gloom and doom of the setting: an unidentified blight of a modern city. Shot in Los Angeles on locations chosen by their resemblance to New York, manipulated to look perpetually gray and overcast, pelted with constant rain and drizzle, and accompanied by the unending urban ambience of industrial noise and never-ending traffic, it's a step away from the unending night of Blade Runner (1982). In the words of production designer Arthur Max, Fincher "wanted a sense of collapse and decay, things weren't working and society was breaking down, so visually the idea was to texture the world with a corrosion that reflected the moral decay around them." The effort to create that atmosphere bled over into the real world, according to Morgan Freeman: "The set was dark and unhealthy," he remarked in an interview. "The director, David Fincher, and others developed a chronic cough because of the water and mineral oil that was blown into the air to create the murky atmosphere."

Much of the film is set in run-down apartments in seedy slums, gloomy places with more clutter than light. They look as if they were lit with ten watt bulbs, with the cold blast of hazy winter light through the grimy windows making it seem all the more dark. The characters live in a perpetual twilight, the visual reflection of the moral world in which Mills seems to think he can make a difference. Somerset has long since given up on that fantasy. By the end of Seven he's handed one more reason to retire.

Producers: Phyllis Carlyle and Arnold Kopelson
Director: David Fincher
Screenplay: Andrew Kevin Walker
Cinematography: Darius Khondji
Art Direction: Gary Wissner
Music: Howard Shore
Film Editing: Richard Francis-Bruce
Cast: Brad Pitt (Detective David Mills), Morgan Freeman (Detective. Lt. William Somerset), Gwyneth Paltrow (Tracy Mills), R. Lee Ermey (Police Captain), Richard Roundtree (District Attorney Martin Talbot), Kevin Spacey (John Doe).
C-127m. Letterboxed.

by Sean Axmaker