Se7en Review

Fincher and Darius Khondji drown the unnamed city in permanent rain and push the negative through a bleach bypass, so blacks crush and skin goes gray. The result feels contaminated before a single crime scene appears. The murders are mostly withheld: the sloth victim is the only sustained horror image, and the rest arrive as photographs, notebooks and forensic description, which forces the audience to assemble the atrocities itself. Morgan Freeman plays Somerset as a man already finished with the world, and Brad Pitt plays Mills with an impatience that is charming at first and eventually the mechanism of his destruction.

Kevin Spacey's late arrival works partly because he was kept out of the credits and the marketing. Kyle Cooper's scratched and stuttering title sequence spawned its own subgenre. The screenplay's weakness is procedural convenience, particularly the library records and the too-neat trail to the apartment. None of it matters at the finish, a flat desert under power lines where Fincher refuses the rescue the genre demands. That ending is why the film lasts.