Analysis of the Opening Sequence of 'Se7en' 1995

Director: David Fincher

Starring: Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt

Opening Sequence

The movie begins with a medium long-shot of William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) from the back, the colour-scheme of the room is very dull, everything is very organised and neat, this is all stereotypical of a man who lives alone, with no womanly touch to brighten the place up, or kids to create clutter. This also shows that he is a very organised person. We can hear diegetic sounds in the background; busy traffic and people in other apartments through the walls. Somerset has laid out all of the things he is going to take with him in a neat line, we also see his jacket laid on his well made bed (the way his bed is made suggests a military background), which implies that he has OCD when it comes to how tidy things are.

We then cut to a murder that Somerset is investigating, he is wearing stereotypical detective clothes; a trench coat and a fedora hat. Somerset asks whether "the kids saw" the murder, and another police officer on the scene tells him that he is always asking these strange question that no one else asks, showing that he thinks outside the box and is rather intelligent. David Mills (Brad Pitt) then enters, he appears to be the opposite of Somerset; young, white, wearing a leather jacket to suggest rebellion and he generally looks rather scruffy. The scene cuts to outside, it is raining, this pathetic fallacy sets the grim and dark mood of the movie, we discover that Somerset is retiring in 7 days, luckily, just enough time for 1 big case.

There is then a short scene showing Somerset reading a book in bed, again showing his intelligence, and you wouldn't catch Mills reading a book at bedtime. Somerset then puts the book down and starts up a metronome, to center himself and drown out the rest of the world, we here the sound levels of the metronome increase and the traffic grow quieter to show this. The metronome could also be a metaphor for the passing of time, or the countdown to when the murders begin.

The title sequence begins, the incidental music is rather scratchy and unpleasant, the same goes with the text's font, signifying the unpleasantness that the detectives will experience throughout the movie. We see grotesque pictures of broken hands and images of sexual words like "intercourse" being crossed out, as well as the eyes of people in pictures being crossed out, this suggests that the murders in the film will be religious as it was once believed that if a person's eyes were in a picture it would take part of their soul.