by Paul Costello
You look at the top ten grossing movies of 1995, and you see the majority of them are aimed at a younger audience, if not the whole family. Toy Story, Pocahontas, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Batman Forever, Jumanji, Casper, all pretty light fare. Even the more successful stuff aimed at adults (Apollo 13 and GoldenEye) is fairly approachable. However, there is one title that sticks out very clearly amongst all the others. Amongst the films about toys coming alive, cartoonish action and hi-jinx in the jungle, one film serves up a harsh crime thriller/horror with one of the most compelling serial killers in moviedom.
That film is Se7en. The killer is John Doe.
You look at the top ten grossing movies of 1995, and you see the majority of them are aimed at a younger audience, if not the whole family. Toy Story, Pocahontas, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Batman Forever, Jumanji, Casper, all pretty light fare. Even the more successful stuff aimed at adults (Apollo 13 and GoldenEye) is fairly approachable. However, there is one title that sticks out very clearly amongst all the others. Amongst the films about toys coming alive, cartoonish action and hi-jinx in the jungle, one film serves up a harsh crime thriller/horror with one of the most compelling serial killers in moviedom.
That film is Se7en. The killer is John Doe.
Se7en is almost 20 years old now. You know how much edge it has lost in all that time? Not one bit. It remains as disturbing, shocking and unerringly nihilistic as it was when it was released. Taking its cue from classical literature, religious tomes and epic poetry, Andrew Kevin Walker’s script is soaked in the murky details of moral absolutism in a world long since rotten to the core.
The crimes of John Doe are horrific, brutal and sadistic. They are also, by his reckoning, completely justified. Doe doesn’t deny what he has done, in fact hopes for them to be seen as “the example” of how to turn an evil world back on itself. As a world realised on film, director David Fincher and his team do a remarkable job in creating places that you feel dirty for having seen, the grime so palpable on the screen. And Walker’s words are a devastating mix of insane and coldly logical.
The crimes of John Doe are horrific, brutal and sadistic. They are also, by his reckoning, completely justified. Doe doesn’t deny what he has done, in fact hopes for them to be seen as “the example” of how to turn an evil world back on itself. As a world realised on film, director David Fincher and his team do a remarkable job in creating places that you feel dirty for having seen, the grime so palpable on the screen. And Walker’s words are a devastating mix of insane and coldly logical.
And Kevin Spacey brings these words disturbingly to life. The firmness of his words noting his guiltless self-righteousness, his barely contained anger at what the world has forced him to do, the moment he comes almost to tears that the world around is so evil that his actions are necessary, and the certainty of his legacy… for the words and how they are spoken, this might just be the single most clearly defined, and understandable, mind of a serial killer ever seen on film.
Setting the scene:
Having surrendered himself to the ones chasing him, John Doe has agreed to take detectives Somerset and Mills to the bodies of his last two victims, out in the desert area outside of the city. Whilst driving Doe to the location, Mills engages Doe about the motivation for his crimes. Seeing Mills’s inability to recognise the purpose of his work, Doe enlightens him on the deeply unsettling justification of why…
Setting the scene:
Having surrendered himself to the ones chasing him, John Doe has agreed to take detectives Somerset and Mills to the bodies of his last two victims, out in the desert area outside of the city. Whilst driving Doe to the location, Mills engages Doe about the motivation for his crimes. Seeing Mills’s inability to recognise the purpose of his work, Doe enlightens him on the deeply unsettling justification of why…
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