Se7en

This unremittingly bleak tale of murder and attrition from director David Fincher is an astonishing cinematic statement, that remains as shocking today as when it was first released in 1995. It is a masterpiece of the macabre and modern gothic, and sits in the same category as Psycho - a film that proves pure genre pieces can be as profound and inventive as any cinematic expression.

Se7en follows Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt as two detectives in their respective last and first weeks on the job, following the case of a serial killer who mutilates his victims and labels the crimes with one of the seven deadly sins. The murders, though off screen, are nonetheless gory and graphic, and form the gritty substance of the film.

Murky and dark, the opening segments of the film trap the audience in a purgatorial city of depravity, fear and constant decay. As the investigators meditate on the writings of Milton and Chaucer, we are pulled in to the psychology of a killer who we've yet to meet. Most intriguingly of all, and virtually unique in good crime films, we are forced to focus on the how, rather than the why of the grisly murders.

As Fincher unveils the ace up the film's sleeve, we are pulled with the characters into the blinding light of day, and left with the uncomfortable notion that self-understanding is the worst fruit plucked from the tree of knowledge. Dazzlingly pure and perfectly realised, Se7en is in many ways the epitaph of modernist cinema, and gave Fincher the freedom to move on to tackling post-modernism, a goal he would achieve with Fight Club.
5/5