Such films [as Seven] legitimize our passivity as consumers and as citizens, and we can soak in our pessimism as if it were a warm bath, fondle our sour apathy as if it were a form of higher wisdom. To call our current state the decline of civilization sounds a lot grander than to see it as the erosion of a few Western power bases (whose erosion might actually benefit the world at large) or as the result of a decline in government services.[…]
The long-term absence of new thinking in commercial filmmaking [above] all reflects a rigid business policy to exploit existing markets to the limit rather than develop any new ones, which would require risk and creativity. One of those overworked genres sees urban blight as the occasion for a detached euphoria linked to metaphysical fatalism. The trick is to make it feel like a fresh idea, a trick that Seven pulls off remarkably well.
[…]
The credits [introduce] us to some of the belongings and activities of the not-yet-introduced serial killer — or are they the materials and activities of the police who are investigating the killer much later in the picture? Our uncertainty about this seems pivotal rather than incidental: the links between art making, murder, and murder investigation are what matter.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader)
Christopher Nolan shares [a] world of masculine darkness with Fincher and the immense popularity of both directors suggests the unfulfilled thirst for negativity in the culture. Yet while Nolan’s yarns spool out in the endless maze of individual trauma—some controlling incident from the past has locked in character and narrative, dissolving time into a Möbius strip—Fincher’s tales categorically reject individual biography as a sufficient cause for the sheer volume of male sociopaths running amok.
— J. M. Tyree (Film Quarterly)
In classic crime fiction [order] and security have been restored to the world, a demonstration that such restoration is always possible. Yet the whole construction of Seven, above all its unending gloom and murmur, suggests that such rigorous closure has made no difference whatsoever to a world that was never ordered and secure to begin with.[…]
The foundational sin of humanity, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, is the desire to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Even if such an allusion is not being mobilised, Seven certainly draws on an awareness of how much watching thrillers is about knowing — detecting but also seeing — nasty things.
[…]
Some people, when they learnt that I was writing about Seven, said that they had not been able to bring themselves to see it, to which I replied that they need not have worried since you don't see anything.
[…]
[Tracy's death is] comparable to the death of Cordelia in King Lear. Another embodiment of goodness, also rather underdeveloped in the writing, who, just when you expect deliverance, is announced dead. Both cases are devastating for what they mean, but this is located in the man's suffering and his loss of a male fantasy of domestic repose.
— Richard Dyer: BFI Film Classics: Seven (2024)
Synopsis: Two homicide detectives are on a desperate hunt for a serial killer whose crimes are based on the "seven deadly sins" in this dark and haunting film that takes viewers from the tortured remains of one victim to the next. The seasoned Det. Sommerset researches each sin in an effort to get inside the killer's mind, while his novice partner, Mills, scoffs at his efforts to unravel the case.