Critics reviews

With a title sequence that references both Stan Brakhage and To Kill a Mockingbird, Se7en announces itself as a decidedly progressive genre text. Throughout his career, but particularly in this early masterwork, Fincher's consumed the fleeting styles of Hollywood and mainstream film and redirected them, turning them into something altogether different yet somehow recognizable, even classical, if only because they share the immaculate polish of works by studio greats like Otto Preminger.

This is a crushingly well-composed movie, one that moves to a brutal rhythm, that creaks and groans and drips and cries out without mercy... The real concern here is not one of theology but, as is so often the case for Fincher, of ethics. In this case, the question is the largest of Fincher's career to date: is cinema evil? Which is another way of asking, is there a line film cannot cross, or is it, by its very existence, unforgivable?

Some reviewers have been calling the film hackneyed and implausible. I suppose they're right about the plot, but their observations ignore what makes the movie a noteworthy achievement, which is almost entirely a matter of stylistic freshness and conviction, the special look and feel of certain actors and sets.

For all its power, Seven remains first and last a stylistic exercise, and its message, like most messages nowadays, is to remain exactly where we are.