The Seventh Victim (1943)'s comments

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karuss

The ending is superb, completely canceling the ridiculous scene between good and evil that came beforehand.

4 years 4 months ago

The Seventh Victim is a thing of parts, all intriguing, but do they fit together? That's what I was struggling with for the length of the film. It's about a young woman whose sister is missing after a tangle with - as we discover - a group of Satanists. Her younger sister heads out to New York to find her, and with the help of various interesting characters, eventually does. But it does mean the protagonist's role switches from one woman to the other at some point, making the narrative uneven. The striking image of a chair and noose, alone in a rented room, is only one of many to make the the film unsettling, along with a great many noir tricks that tap into the leads' paranoia. The first half of the film is about the anxiety of finding yourself alone in a strange city, the second a thought-provoking nihilistic exploration of the cult's strictly non-violent evil. While the eerie atmosphere is unimpeachable and the script quite literate, I'm not sure The Seventh Victim is as structurally coherent as it needs to be.

6 years 6 months ago