Se7en/YMMV

• Alternate Character Interpretation: William Somerset and John Doe are the only really sane men, knowing damn well how bad the world is, but differ on how they deal with it (which essentially makes Doe Somerset's Evil Counterpart).
  • Well, from his diaries, we know that Doe is the type of man who would vomit on a guy who just asks him about the weather and laugh about it because he finds the average human being absolutely disgusting, so its not quite the same thing. Both believe they live in a Crapsack World, but Doe believes that because he is a completely egotistical bastard who ignores his own rampant hypocrisy, so he's not really an Only Sane Man (not by a mile) so much as Right for the Wrong Reasons (for a really, really cynical interpretation of "right").
• Anvilicious: We live in a Crapsack World. The film is not in any way subtle about reinforcing these points.
• Complete Monster: Oh god, John Doe.
• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: Let's face it, the film is absurdly dark.
  • Although Mills and Somerset remain sympathetic for almost the entirety of the movie.
• Fridge Logic: Doe has an obsessive hatred against "sinners", a grandiose sense of self-worth, and is a perverted sexual sadist. This makes him more guilty of Wrath, Pride and Lust than the victims of those sins. But since he's clearly a nutjob, this is probably a literal case of Insane Troll Logic.
  • More generally, though: it's been raining in the city for nearly a week and it's implied the city gets a lot of rain. At the climax of the movie, our heroes head out of the city into the immediate environs... which are a flat desert that behaves as though it hasn't seen rain in months^[1]. Right, then.
    • Just say that area is in A Major Rainshaow
  • The victim of the Lust killing is not actually guilty of the crime of lust herself. Lapse into lazy writing and casual misogyny on the part of the screenwriter, or apt characterisation of John Doe as a woman-hater himself who of course would blame lust on the prostitute rather then the men she services? Your call, viewer.
    • You could argue that the john is the true intended victim, as now he'll have to live with that memory.
    • It's also possible that John Doe blamed Lust for enabling other people's sins.
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: Mills and Somerset panicking over the legal implications of the FBI secretly tracking potential criminals via certain books taken from the library, and their use of said evidence to track down John Doe. In an age where the War on Terror and the rise of the Internet has turned that kind of thing Up to Eleven, it all seems rather quaint.
  • For the same reasons, Somerset's insistence that they need a warrant to get into John Doe's apartment. "Emergency" warrants are extremely easy to secure following the PATRIOT Act.
• Gambit Roulette: John Doe's plan hinges upon: the police finding the Gluttony message behind the fridge, the Sloth victim not being discovered ahead of time, the police finding the message hidden behind the painting in Gould's office, the police being able to connect the fingerprints behind the painting to the Sloth victim, the police finding the Sloth victim on the appropriate day, the package containing Tracy's head arriving at the scene at the right time, somebody actually opening said package and seeing its contents (one of the cops in the helicopter, upon seeing the package, radios for the bomb squad to be brought in - why would this not be Somerset's first assumption?), and convincing Mills to kill John Doe, without anyone intervening. Additionally, practically every murder takes place in a location where someone could have easily interrupted John Doe before completing the murder in question (Somerset notes that John Doe left the scene of the Gluttony murder twice in order to buy more spaghetti sauce, and hand waves no one interrupting the Greed murder with Somebody Else's Problem) - he was extraordinarily lucky that no one did so. Finally, when Somerset and Mills arrive at John Doe's apartment he fires upon them from a distance, and again when they give chase - Somerset and Mills form an integral part of his plan, so he must have been missing on purpose, but he was still lucky that he didn't accidentally hit one of them.
• Nightmare Fuel: All five murders to differing extents, especially Sloth.
• It Was His Sled: People who don't know who plays the villain, or what happens in the dénouement, are pretty hard to come by.
• Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize: Ingeniously averted. The name of the guy you recognize doesn't appear on the poster or in the opening credits, and you don't get a clear shot of his face until the third act.
• Seinfeld Is Unfunny: Modern viewers might find the notion of a serial killer who implements cruel and elaborate tortures to deliver Karmic Death to his victims to be cliche, but in 1995 it was genuinely horrifying and new. That most of the films inspired by Se7en have been more focused on the Gorn and pure shock value aspects of the film than its meticulously-crafted atmosphere and cerebral tone certainly hasn't helped matters.
• Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: According to John Doe, part of his motivation.
• Unfortunate Implications: The only explicitly Jewish character in the film, the lawyer Eli Gould, is murdered because he is so greedy. That being said, it's not inconceivable that John Doe is anti-Semitic on top of everything else.
• What the Hell, Casting Agency?: Or in this case, WTH Promotions. David Fincher mentions in a commentary track that for reasons he cannot fathom, the people who went out looking for test audiences for the movie used Driving Miss Daisy and Legends of the Fall as examples of movies that Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, respectively, have been in. So naturally, most of the people in the audience were the kind of people who would watch films like Driving Miss Daisy and Legends of the Fall, and not films like, well, Se7en. Fincher said that after the movie got out, he was standing outside the theater, and three middle-aged women walked past him. As they did so, one said "Whoever made this movie should be shot."

1. ↑ which, conveniently, is the geography closest and cheapest to Los Angeles