Se7en

In a nameless, rain-soaked American city, veteran detective William Somerset is counting down his final days before retirement when he's paired with younger transfer David Mills. Their temperaments clash immediately — Somerset weary, methodical, and deeply pessimistic about the city's moral decay; Mills impatient, idealistic, and hungry to matter. Their first joint case is the apparent death of a morbidly obese man found face-down in food at a filthy apartment. Somerset notices the man's ankles were bound, a bucket of vomit nearby, evidence of forced consumption. Behind the refrigerator, written in grease: GLUTTONY. A staged tableau, not a random death. The next day a wealthy lawyer is found dead, his blood used to write HELP ME on the carpet; hidden on the wall in the right light is GREED. The victim had been forced to cut a pound of flesh from his own body and bled to death. With two murders clearly themed around deadly sins, Somerset understands what they're dealing with: a serial killer constructing a moralistic series of crimes around all seven sins, in sequence, to completion. He agrees to stay past his retirement because he sees where this is going and doesn't trust Mills to navigate it alone.

A gaunt skeletal man is found strapped to a bed in a decrepit apartment surrounded by hundreds of air fresheners — barely alive, kept in that state for a year through meticulous, sustained torture. SLOTH. The planning and patience involved rattle every cop and forensic tech who enters the scene. Somerset arranges a clandestine pull of library records to identify patrons who recently borrowed books on the seven deadly sins and related theology. The name they find is John Doe. They locate his apartment in a crumbling building and arrive just as a hooded figure appears in the hallway. A chase through rain-slicked streets ends with Doe getting the drop on Mills in an alley and holding a gun to his head — then walking away. He has a larger plan and needs them alive. Inside the apartment: walls of handwritten notebooks filled with meticulous observations, rants on society's failures, and detailed plans underpinned by his belief that he is on a divinely sanctioned mission to punish the wicked and force the world to confront its apathy.

Two more sins follow in quick succession. For LUST, Doe forces a man at a sex club at gunpoint to kill a woman using a bladed device; the man is left hysterical and broken, the guilt redirected onto someone he forced to act. For PRIDE, a vain model is disfigured and given a choice: call for help and live scarred, or take sleeping pills and die. She chooses death. Doe tailors each punishment to the victim's defining sin, often engineering a second person to bear the guilt of the killing.