THE IMDB TOP 50 CHALLENGE #29 Se7en

Serial killers and violent slashers have been a staple of Hollywood for so long that they’ve become hackneyed, clichéd and, quite frankly, dull. There are only so many times an audience can watch the same plot rehashed, the same killers recycled and the same deaths re-enacted. Praise the lord, then, for Se7en – without question the greatest serial killer movie of all time.

In one key way, Se7en subverts our expectations of the genre: we are given no clue about the killer’s identity. The audience is never asked or expected to identify him and are never given a glimpse of him at work. Instead, we are provided with another mystery to solve: how will he kill next?

Selecting his victims so that he might punish them for committing the seven deadly sins (gluttony, sloth, pride, envy, lust, greed and wrath), the killer constructs elaborate crime scenes and creative deaths: gluttony sees a fat man chained to a table and forced to eat pasta sauce until his stomach ruptures, sloth involves the near mummification of a victim tied to his bed for a year and kept barely alive.

The killer (unimaginatively christened John Doe) is methodical, intelligent and patient – everything that happens in Se7en is part of a masterplan which culminates in one of the most brilliantly plotted twists ever. Anyone who second-guessed the film’s ending is a liar or a genius. Or a sociopathic murderer.

Hints at Doe’s state of mind are provided in the finest title sequence I’ve ever seen. Featuring the construction of his notebooks, Fincher had a team working tirelessly to produce genuine artefacts of hand-written scrawls, psychotic outpourings and horrifying images of torture and disfigurement. This filmed process is truly horrifying.

Although John Doe’s murders belong strictly in the present day, everything else about Se7en is decidedly old-fashioned. The central relationship between Brad Pitt’s impetuous young cop, Mills, and Morgan Freeman’s weary Somerset has been seen a thousand times. But their dynamic is crucial: Mill’s hot-headedness is just as important as Somerset’s intelligent understanding of Doe’s literary references to the likes of Milton, Chaucer and the Bible.

The set design and costume also belong to a bygone era. Cops wear trenchcoats and carry flashlights, phones are attached to walls, furniture is heavy and wooden, the rain never stops pouring. When light, colour and modernity impinge on proceedings it’s usually to illustrate the gaudy nature of Doe’s killings and the perceived sins of his victims.

To say much more would be to destroy Se7en’s power. There are too many surprises which could be spoilt, too many creative touches which could be ruined. Be warned that Se7en is not a film for the faint hearted and occasionally requires a strong stomach. But the gruesome nature of its crime scenes is not exploitative or gratuitous. Rather, they are an insight into a twisted and warped mindset and a crucial part of drawing the audience into a highly original and intelligent horror movie which remains unrivalled sixteen years after its original release.

Contagion

A film which promises to kill off Gwyneth Paltrow after ten minutes is one that deserves to be watched – particularly when the rest of the cast consists of big hitters like Matt Damon, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard and the criminally underrated John Hawkes. Director Steve Soderbergh has marshalled such a talented ensemble to great success before: will Contagion emulate the success of Ocean’s Eleven or flop like its disastrous sequels?

The movie opens with a sweating, coughing business woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from abroad to her husband and family in Minneapolis. She’s carrying a lethal virus picked up in China - and dropping in on her lover in Chicago en route she begins to spread the infection across the USA. The pandemic takes root, Paltrow dies and the Centre for Disease Control, World Health Organisation and Homeland Security are called in. The action jumps from location to location as the authorities attempt to prevent the outbreak’s spread and dampen the growing sense of international panic.

As you’d expect from Soderbergh, Contagion is extremely sick. Arguably its greatest strengths are kinetic sequences showing the transmission of the virus from one person to the next. Probably the greatest of these shows Paltrow’s character passing her infection around a busy casino: an environment the director has repeatedly proved himself comfortable in.

The human drama of the situation is dealt with less capably. Matt Damon tries manfully to inject some gravitas into his schlubby grieving father, but of the ensemble cast he’s the only one really worth caring about. This is the fault of an overly-ambitious storyline which simply attends to too many characters in too many locations. A tighter focus on a smaller number of stories would have allowed deeper explorations of the more interesting characters: an entire storyline concerning Marion Cotillard’s WHO inspector could easily be culled with no detrimental effect on the movie.

To be fair, Jude Law’s shifty medical blogger could quite easily have been cut out, too. He’s an irritant for both the authorities and the home audience – not least because of his dodgy and unnecessary Australian accent. If his role is to represent the world of technology and the way news (both true and false) spreads, then Soderbergh is over-egging the pudding. There are enough mentions of Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging as it is.

To be so critical of the film is perhaps a little unfair. It’s a thoroughly engaging watch and features some strong performances and some notable twists and turns. Sadly, it feels slightly episodic thanks to the separate story strands which are not tied together as neatly as they were in Soderbergh’s Crash. Still, there are worse ways to spend an evening than in the company of a cast like this in a thriller which resonates with an audience familiar with health scares like SARS and H1N1.