What was actually in the box in ‘Seven’?
David Fincher has mastered the art of the thriller, specialising in endings. Between the identity-unveiling plot twist at the end of Fight Club and the victorious villainy in the final shot of Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne, Fincher knows how to leave an audience breathless with visual storytelling. But one of his most iconic final moments relies entirely on what the audience doesn’t see.
The director’s second feature film and his first venture into thriller territory, Seven, demonstrated Fincher’s immediate aptness for creating tension in a film’s final moments. The film followed Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as David Mills and William Somerset partnered detectives who find themselves working on the case of a killer who themes each of his murders around one of the seven deadly sins. It was an ingenious concept with a shocking ending.
Towards the end of the film, Mills and Somerset seemingly have the upper hand. John Doe has handed himself in to the police and promises to lead the detectives to the location of his final victims. When they reach their destination, a delivery van approaches them and provides Somerset with a box for Mills. Upon opening, Somerset declares, “John Doe has the upper hand”, before running over to his partner.
Fincher doesn’t allow the audience to witness the contents of the box, leaving them to discern it themselves through Doe’s conversation with Mills. The murderer shares his admiration for Mills and his wife, Tracy, before uttering the words, “I tried to taste the life of a simple man, but it didnt work out. So, I took a souvenir. Her pretty head”.
The ending of Seven explained
Though we, perhaps fortunately, don’t see the inside of the box, the assumption is that Doe killed Mills’ wife in the name of envy and put her head in the box. By delivering it to their location, he prompts the execution of the final seven deadly sins on his list: wrath. Mills, whose anger is exacerbated by the reveal that Tracy was pregnant with their child, fulfils Doe’s wishes and shoots him.
Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote the screenplay for Seven, spoke about the meaning behind the ending in Cinefantastique, suggesting that it reflected real life. He explained: “There’s lots of evil out there, and you’re not always going to get the satisfaction of having any sort of understanding of why that is. That’s one of the many things that scares people the most about serial killers.”
The impact of the film’s ending is only heightened by Fincher’s refusal to show what’s in the box, as audiences are forced to imagine it and feel Mills’ confusion, pain and wrath at that moment. It remains one of Fincher’s best films and one of the most iconic, disturbing and impactful endings in the modern thriller genre. Its cultural relevance is enduring and, “what’s in the box?” remains an endlessly quotable and horrifying line.
