David Fincher’s breakthrough feature comes to 4K UHD in a new transfer supervised by the famously meticulous director, who finds his perfectionistic doppelgänger in the movie’s diabolical serial killer.
Jim Hemphill
January 7, 2025
IndieWire
When David Fincher directed SE7EN in 1995, his reputation was strangely bifurcated. On the one hand, he was a supremely successful commercial and music video director at the top of his field, having helmed innovative and influential shorts for icons including Madonna, Sting, and Rick Springfield. On the other, his one attempt at feature filmmaking, Alien3, had been a bust — a critical disappointment liked by virtually no one, including Fincher himself. Although it has since developed a bit of a cult following, Fincher disowned Alien3 and famously said that he’d rather die of colon cancer than direct another movie.
Luckily for him, and for us, Fincher changed his mind when he came across Andrew Kevin Walker‘s script for SE7EN, a perfectly calibrated blend of intellectual philosophizing and pulpy exploitation that ended up beautifully served by Fincher’s unerring ability to push the psychic trauma the story inflicted on the audience right up to the edge of what was tolerable without going over it. The premise — two cops (Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt) track a serial killer whose crimes are inspired by the seven deadly sins — is the kind of sensationalistic high concept parodied by Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation, but the ingenuity of Walker’s construction and the Alan J. Pakula-inspired elegance of Fincher’s visual style turned what could have been sleazy trash into high art — without entirely forgoing the guilty pleasures of sleazy trash.
The Fincher Analyst 