Se7en shades of evil

MANILA, Philippines - Se7en in true neo-noir flair exacted clarity only in its victims and left everything ambiguous. The city is nameless and forever raining and the Messianic murderer is aptly called John Doe. Good and evil are warped in one twisted frame of mind.  It is buddy cops set-up alright — a rookie and a veteran — but not in the Lethal Weapon variety. The two detectives here are forever dour and have been set up by a faceless murderer to solve a series of crimes from the ancient pages of Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno. They read clues in crime scenes that are as tenuous as the fragile thread that bonds the veteran and the rookie cop.

One will never settle in even if he has already increasingly grasped the shocking genius of the preaching madman who will only reveal his face in the last third of the movie. Se7en, in its pre-9/11 universe, is at an age of innocence — Brad Pitt is not yet 49 years old, David Fincher is eons from logging on to The Social Network, Keyser Sose is about to be born yet and Nine Inch Nails’ Closer still finds a Hollywood mood to match. But this is the movie that forced people to invent the clichéd phrase “spoiler alert” and convinced the local distributors to insultingly insert crucial word in acetate as if moviegoers will really not get it.

Se7en, for all its horrors, is easy to distill. The theme is seven and everything is about seven. The seven days of the week, the seven deadly sins, the seven murders and the seven victims. It is a movie that can be summarized in one sentence, a movie that should really be seen and experienced rather than just heard from another who did.

Fincher did not show how John Doe, wickedly played by Kevin Spacey before he became Keyse Sose, killed his victims. We are shown with dead and bloated bodies that have undergone brutality befitting the deadly sins that they were made to embody.

As the names don’t matter anymore in the face of unknown evil, it becomes convenient to refer to each victim to the sin he or she represented: Mr. Gluttony, Ms. Pride, Mr. Sloth and so on. The movie’s conclusion, however, is about the last two sins; the first five are just building blocks to what will come to unravel as the most shocking and horrifying of endings. It is a punch-in-the-gut ending. It will leave the engrossed viewer sick. But at its most gruesome, the movie climaxed without a rotting body or a mutilated body part to show.

Se7en is a crime thriller often confused as a horror movie. If it is, then it is that rare breed of a horror movie, which does not parade monsters and show the actual murderous rampage. It is definitely a legacy of pre-9/11 movie innocence. Conjuring now a faceless, self-righteous crusader who will passionately kill and maim in the name of God evokes images from a daily CNN headline. The Hemingway reference at the end is apt as it is doubly revealing.

As well indeed, the world is not really a beautiful place; we just should keep fighting for its order and grace.

(About the author: Quiñonez is a lawyer and congressional chief of staff.)