The mind is a carnival, full of freak and fantasy. It’s a place where the wild things are, where the darkness reaches for you and eats you from the inside out. It’s a place that creates symphonies and gives the intangible texture. It is in this vein that Se7en was conceived.
Whether you consider yourself religious, agnostic or atheist, whether you consider beauty completely irrelevant, bordering on arrogant and a sign of lack of intelligence, this film does something to the viewers that transcends the superficial squabbles that separate them. Se7en manages to get under the skin using the skin as a mechanism for gruesome beauty. Its perfection as a work of art is understated, but it also seems to go unnoticed by those who speak of its technical merit without considering its elemental mastery. I’m becoming long-winded and I apologise. Perhaps the best way to introduce the audience to a piece of cinematic excellence is to propose a question:
Which sin will send you to your grave?
I don’t mean to wax philosophical or religious. Actually, my intention is to reposition the textured layers of this film. If I can give readers of this post a fraction of the creep through the flesh the film mastered, then I think I’ve done my job. Firstly, one must consider the atmosphere.
The palette is simple and borderline pretentious — a photographer’s masturbatory heaven! However, what it seems to lack in grandiose settings it more than compensates for in atmosphere. What’s more, if you take a deeper understanding of the lighting and colour of this film, you’ll find that cinematographer Darius Khondji has a stunning eye for the ominous –as can be gleaned from his earlier projects La Cité des Enfants Perdus and Delicatessen. But this isn’t a blog about the beauty of the film, the skin chilling precision with which each act is carried out. This blog is intended to make you come face to face with your mortality and try to decide what it is that will finally turn out your lights –just as the film itself accomplished.
Madasa Writing 