Seven: A Review for Redemption?

 Murder with a motive and a sense of poetic justice and with an artistic flare is a core to this film. In some ways, his film hold certain tropes that are shattered and used in a sense of irony. Seven could have been a run of the mill murder/thriller film, but it was not. Sure, some aspect of this film set in New York do capture the city’s essence, the cramped conditions, the short tempers. This environment makes John Doe’s character, as depraved as he was, more sympathetic.

           

 Mills and Summerset are total opposites, which is an understatement. Summerset (Freeman), is just as cold and calculating as Doe, the killer. His sense of ethics may be a bit off-kilter, but he has an actual reason for this. Even with his toughened exterior and interior, there is humanity inside of him which peeks out several times. Summerset is a character whose experience with lie has taught him much, and he strikes me as the type who learns from those life lessons.

           

 Mills is cocky, reckless, with a disregard for the rules, but like Summerset, he does have a set of ethics, but his are much more loose and bend to his emotions. But, there’s a nurturing and even child-like: his love for his wife and dogs, which he tries to hide unsuccessfully. His recklessness nearly get him killed and ultimately was his greatest weakness. Mills strikes me as the type who sees anger as an appropriate response to most situations. In another light, Mills puts his entire being into his work, he is just ignorant of how to care for himself emotionally.

           

 Perhaps Doe is one of the more memorable characters? He adheres to the standard aspects of a psychopath, but he has perhaps more depth to him than Mills and Summerset. Dark depths to be sure. Doe’s character is shrouded in darkness, which drives Mills crazy. I find it amusing they both start to get inside of the others heads in the car toward the end. His notebooks hint at his meticulous rituals and his home sets up parallels to other examples of psychopaths. Doe’s disdain for humanity is the darkest aspect to his character. His journal entries (2,000 journals to be exact) displays this. His anger is likely beyond that of Mills. Doe’s rage stems from the impurity of secular America, but he’s a hypocrite. He is no different than the racists who kill others due to their skin color, or the Christian extremist whose vile rhetoric turns into fatal action.

             

The musical score in this film made me fall in love with “Air” by Bach and the literary references. The Inferno is not a poem about judgement, but redemption. The irony is suffocating in this sense. There is a way out of Hell: you must go far away from the light to get to it. Or drive a detective to the breaking point.

          

  Now that I think of it, Doe committed suicide by cop. That is his redemption, his way out of his own personal Hell.

          

  Back to the musical score. The incorporation of classical music set this film apart from the standard thriller film. “Air” created this atmosphere of some esoteric, gray space of the mind during the research scene.

            

 To conclude, Seven is not the standard psycho thriller, it is a bit more. It is more sophisticated than the usual Criminal Minds (to a point), CSI, and the like.