“What’s in the box?!”
C. Molly Smith and Will Robinson
September 21, 2023
Entertainment Weekly
In 1995, Brad Pitt‘s exclamation of fear and dread jolted audiences and left a lasting cultural imprint. The ending of Seven, director David Fincher‘s breakout film, is one of the most shocking, disturbing, and iconic twists in modern cinema, capping a tight, wrought thriller.
The film’s initial introduction to its world, a metropolis mired in unrest, is normal enough. Cool veteran Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is paired with young hothead Detective Mills (Pitt) in pursuing a serial killer who picks his victims based on the seven deadly sins. They follow the clues and corpses, and the murderous John Doe (Kevin Spacey) eventually makes it into their custody, promising to reveal his two final victims—targeted for envy and wrath.
But the third act abandons cinematic tropes and convention. The promise of the final two corpses is questioned when a mysterious box arrives that is Doe’s coup de grace; it contains the head of Mills’ wife, Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow)—never seen on screen, but revealed through dialogue and reaction. Doe acted on his envy of Mills’ normal life and incurs Mills’ lethal wrath. Though he’s killed at the hands of the good guy, the bad guy’s death serves as a loss for the positive forces of the world.
And it was all this close to not happening; “What’s in the box?!” nearly missed its canonization. Fincher, scribe Andrew Kevin Walker, and some of the cast, including Brad Pitt, fought for the original planned finale, against the studio’s protests. The producers eventually conceded to uphold the work’s artistic integrity. “There’s nothing wrong with up endings, it’s just that the dark ending of Seven was what it was about,” Walker told Uproxx. “To change the ending to something else was to remove the very heart of the story.”
Entertainment Weekly looks at how off-camera elements of the film successfully crafted suspense and resulted in Seven‘s enduring ending.
The Fincher Analyst 