Feature Friday: Se7en and the Twist That Makes the Detectives the Weapon
★ GOAT
Feature Friday is the week’s centerpiece: one movie’s twist gets the full treatment instead of a capsule writeup. Se7en (1995, David Fincher, written by Andrew Kevin Walker) earns that slot as one of the bleakest studio thrillers ever to become a mainstream hit, and as a film whose famous ending was fought over, at nearly every stage of its making, by people who wanted it to be something easier.
When retiring police Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) tackles a final case with the aid of newly transferred David Mills (Brad Pitt), they discover a number of elaborate and grisly murders. They soon realize they are dealing with a serial killer (Kevin Spacey) who is targeting people he thinks represent one of the seven deadly sins. Somerset also befriends Mills’ wife, Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), who is pregnant and afraid to raise her child in the crime-riddled city.
The Deep Dive
John Doe, the killer, doesn’t get caught; he walks into the police station covered in blood and turns himself in, then offers to lead the detectives to the last two bodies on the condition that both of them come with him. Out in a remote stretch of open ground, a delivery van arrives with a package for Detective Mills. Detective Somerset sees what is inside and tells Mills to put his gun down. Doe explains that he is envy – he envied Mills’s life with his wife, Tracy – and that the package contains her severed head. He wants Mills to be wrath. Mills shoots him, and in doing so completes the seventh sin. The detectives were never chasing Doe. They were the last piece of his plan.
Production history. Walker began the script in 1991 while working at a record store, drawing on the culture shock of moving from suburban Pennsylvania to New York City in the late 1980s. An earlier production company demanded a softer ending – one in which Doe kills Mills and Tracy survives – and Walker wrote it, later saying he felt he was ruining his script. When New Line took the project on, Fincher, coming off a miserable experience directing Alien 3, insisted on the original script, head-in-the-box ending included. Brad Pitt joined on the condition that the ending stay, and insisted that Mills be the one to kill Doe, because he felt Mills had to act out of passion instead of morality.
How it landed. Test audiences were middling, and the studio did not expect a film this violent and this bleak to do well. Instead it grossed $327 million worldwide, roughly ten times its budget, and became one of the year’s biggest hits. Its most famous choice is what it doesn’t show: the contents of the box are never seen. The studio’s support for the original ending depended on that, and the editor added a four-frame flash of Tracy at the moment Mills fires to stand in for it.
How the film hid its killer. Kevin Spacey asked that his name be left out of the marketing and the opening credits, reasoning that a recognizable actor billed third in a movie about two men hunting a killer would give the ending away. Doe doesn’t appear in person until the last act, but the film builds him from the start through his handiwork, his journals, and an opening title sequence, designed by Kyle Cooper, that shows his preparations while the credits run.
Side-by-side against what it influenced. The twist works because it isn’t really about a hidden identity. We know who Doe is the moment he surrenders, and the film’s cruelty is in what he does with the time that follows. Set next to Tuesday’s pick, The Forgotten, whose reveal arrives from outside the story it interrupts, the reveal in Se7en comes after a whole film spent showing us, precisely and patiently, what kind of man planned it. The ending has been widely imitated, but usually without the thing that makes it bearable: Somerset’s last line, quoting Hemingway (“The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for. I agree with the second part.”), which is as close to a consolation as the film is willing to offer.