Murder. Hopelessness. Darkness. The creeping, oppressive fear of life’s monstrous emptiness that spreads in the brain like a malignant tumor and drowns all light and joy in a grim tide of crushing resignation. Bleak stuff, yes? Maybe for silly sheeple like you and I who believe in things like hope, objective truths, and some kind of logically defensible moral structure, but for director David Fincher, nihilistic conceptions of humanity’s bottomless capacity for evil is the stuff of Christmas cards. Perusing through Fincher’s filmography may be like taking a tour of sadness in a museum curated by a man with the outlook of Eeyore (with one bizarrely lighthearted exhibit about the mindset of youth defying the physical bounds of age), but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t enjoy your time in David Fincher’s Circus of Suffering so long as you stay away from girls with tattoos of fictional lizards. Yes, it is hard to call any given Fincher movie “enjoyable”, but it is very easy to call them “great”, and the subject of today’s installment of Magellans at the Movies examines one such example of greatness: the 1995 detective thriller Se7en. Se7en, aside from its unwieldy name, is predictably Fincher-y. It's dark, it centers conflicted characters grappling with overwhelming evil, and, oh yeah, it’s absolutely captivating and shot to utter perfection by a masterful director. We’ll try to keep things as upbeat as possible, but with a movie like this the recommendations and analysis are unlikely to turn your frown upside down, so maybe watch The Lego Movie once you’re done, yeah? Take care of your mental health, folks. Anyhoo, I need to go rethink my life so let the episode commence!
