Se7en Opening Analysis

In the opening of Se7en, imagery is used to portray the atmosphere, narrative and genre of the film; the opening credits, for example, are edited together in a deliberately juddery and mismatched-looking fashion, and is littered with visible and audible glitches and distortion. It shows a montage of close-up shots of a person stitching together a scrapbook of pictures, cutting between shots and skipping time abruptly to make the scene appear disjointed.

I personally think that this is a clever metaphor for the mind of the criminal killer; warped and damaged, (like the camera shots and sound) though cleverly calculated and strung together (like the organised scrapbook) – and in a sense, this provides something of a base for the plot of the rest of the film. It's also worth noting that the person organising the scrapbook is blotting certain parts of the texts and pictures out entirely; pictures of people's faces, for example, and words like “homosexuality”. The choice of words is extremely important; there is a quick close-up of the words “in God we trust” written on a bank-note, and because of the fact that we already know that the film's title refers to the seven deadly sins, the reference to religion is important in establishing the themes of the film.

From the introduction, we can also tell that the person constructing the file is a criminal as opposed to an investigator; he crosses out pictures and people's faces, and doesn't use professional or very precise or clean methods of handling the evidence that he is collecting – and the fact that he is seen slicing skin off the ends of his fingers implies that he wishes to evade detection, and is attempting to erase fingerprints.

The audio is also extremely important; it is extremely harsh-sounding, with a distinctly incoherent feel and regular buzzes and blips to match the confused, jittering visuals. However, the buzzes and blips eventually turn into a drumbeat – and this, much like the jumpy editing and camera work as mentioned earlier, signifies the thought processes of the criminal himself; the glitch effects are representative of his chaotic and insane thoughts, though the drumbeat symbolises a steady theme and rhythm to his work. It all concludes with a spoken line that starts muffled, though audibly ends with the words “closer to God” - and this links back into the religious themes and motives behind the killings.


- Jack