Laura Reyes said:Seven is just so morbid—especially that ending with the head—but honestly, those scenes hit way too hard
Sure, "Se7en" hits you hard in the gut, but honestly? Fincher’s follow-up, "The Game," is way more unsettling because of how twisted the plot gets.
The whole setup relies on these flashbacks at the start... we find out the lead, this big-shot businessman Nicholas van Orton (Michael Douglas), actually watched his father commit suicide when he was just a kid. That trauma basically follows him everywhere, turning him into this totally withdrawn, depressed guy.
Then there's the coincidence—Nicholas is 48 now, exactly the age his dad was when he died. To top it off, his younger brother (Sean Penn) decides to give him this bizarre birthday present: a sort of live-action role-playing game that bleeds directly into his actual life.
Now, here comes the dark stuff. (
SPOILER ALERT!!!)
The first sign that the "game" is actually happening? Nicholas finds a wooden clown lying in front of his house, posed in the exact same way his father was found dead after jumping from the house.
Then it escalates. He finds a note inside the house saying, "Like my father before me, I choose eternal sleep," along with a photo of his dead dad.
Things get even weirder when Nicholas wakes up in a grave in Mexico... he ends up having to sell a watch his father gave him just to bribe some official at the U.S. Embassy.
And the kicker? Nicholas ends up jumping off a building, just like his father did.
What really sticks with me, though, is how the movie wraps up with these incredibly sick jokes. Like, one participant tells Nicholas, "If you hadn't jumped, I would've had to toss you myself." Or when his brother—the mastermind behind it all—explains his motive by saying, "I had to do something. You were acting like an idiot," while pointing to a shirt that says, "They drugged me and left me in Mexico, and all I got was this stupid t-shirt." It's messed up. Truly.
In my opinion, the movie is one of the best ever made, but it probably could have been a masterpiece without all that extra morbid baggage...
